Photo: Mitchell Clark

A camera companion app can unlock convenience and useful creative controls, provided it actually works well. Every major brand now offers at least one such app, promising remote camera control, wireless image transfer, GPS sharing and more, but the reality is often a mix of useful features and flaky connections.

In this piece, we’re taking a closer look at Sony’s latest effort – the Creators’ App – to see how far things have come from the early, frustrating days of camera apps. The Creators’ App supports models going back to the a7S III and is the default for newer bodies. The previous‑generation Imaging Edge Mobile app also works with many of the same cameras, but its newest supported body is the a1 II, so we will be focusing on the Creators’ App here.

I used the Google Pixel 10a for all of my testing, but my colleague reports a similar experience on an iPhone 15 Pro, except where otherwise noted. Your experience and options may differ depending on your device.

Connectivity and reliability

To do most things in the app, you’ll need to use a Wi-Fi connection.

Connecting a camera to the Creators’ App for the first time is straightforward and very quick, so it’s feasible to do even if you’re in a rush. The process uses a Bluetooth connection for initial pairing, along with basic functions like camera status and firmware updates when you open the app each subsequent time.

Most features, though, require either a Wi-Fi connection or a physical USB-C tether between your phone and camera. Using a USB-C cable provides a faster, more stable connection for file importing or camera control than a wireless one, but it also defeats the app’s purpose in some use cases, so I’ve focused on Wi-Fi for my testing. Tapping the “Remote Shooting” or “Import” options will trigger a pop-up that asks which connection type you want to use. This will pop up each time unless you tap the box to “Use Wi-Fi connection from next time.”

Left: The pop-up on the left will show up every time you connect to your camera via Wi-Fi unless you disable it. Right: The connection process isn’t very speedy.

When you connect via Wi-Fi for the first time on Android phones, you’ll see a message from your phone’s system informing you that the Creators’ App wants to use a temporary Wi-Fi network. Selecting “Connect” will disconnect your phone from any other Wi-Fi networks and pair it with the camera’s network.

Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi connection process takes much longer than Bluetooth pairing. Over the course of my testing, it took roughly 16 seconds to connect each time (occasionally faster or slower), which is just long enough to be annoying. The Wi-Fi connection will remain active as long as you remain in the app, or you can end the connection by tapping “Connected via Wi-Fi” just below the camera name.

You can opt to keep the camera connected to your phone even if you leave the app, saving you connection time if you are going back and forth.

If you are going to be in and out of the app during a session and don’t want to wait for it to reconnect each time, you can choose to stay connected even when you close the app via the gear icon in the top right corner. Staying connected lets you access the remote control or image transfer options nearly instantly, but it also means that, as long as your camera is on, your phone won’t be connected to any other Wi-Fi networks.

The connection was mostly reliable, though there were a few occasions when it dropped unexpectedly, or the camera failed to connect to my Android phone. There was one instance that happened multiple times in a row. These were rare, though, so it didn’t drastically impede my use of the app.

Transfer, editing and sharing tools

If you want to transfer Raw files, you’ll need to change the “Image Size for Importing” option to “Original,” even if you turned Raw on for the import target option.

Many look to companion apps to make sharing photos and videos faster and easier. The Creators’ App supports those tools, with options for image and video transfer, cloud syncing and sharing.

On the image transfer side of things, you can choose whether to import ‘JPEG and HEIF,’ Raw or Raw + JPEG / Raw + HEIF. There are a few important things to note here. First, the camera can’t output HEIF and JPEG at the same time, so despite the “and,” you’ll only be importing one of those.

It’s also important to be aware that the app has a setting called ‘Image Size for Importing,’ which defaults to resizing synced files to less than 2MP. At that setting, the app converts the Raw file to a resized JPEG, and downsizes JPEGs, no matter what you have your file types set to. If you don’t change this to ‘Original,’ you’re not actually getting full‑resolution or Raw files.

From left to right: the camera’s main folder, images taken on one particular date and the view with one image selected.

When importing photos, the app helpfully organizes your images into folders for each date, so that you aren’t looking at a massive wall of images. Once in a date, you can select individual files or select all with the checkbox at the top of the display. You can also tap on an image to see it larger and import from there, but, annoyingly, you’ll still need to treat it like you are selecting it by tapping the box in the top left and ‘Import’ at the bottom.

Differential import will upload any images taken since your last upload without requiring you to select any files.

If you want to simplify the transfer process, the app also offers a “differential import” option, which is essentially a smart sync. With this enabled, when you tap to import files, it transfers all new files that aren’t already on your phone. This will prevent you from uploading duplicates of files, and it also serves as a step towards an automatic upload, so you don’t have to select individual files. Of course, if you don’t want everything on your phone, I wouldn’t recommend turning this on.

Photos transferred relatively quickly, even when moving a batch of 30 or so Raw files at once. It’s not as fast as using a quality card reader, but it didn’t keep me waiting long. I didn’t transfer any long videos, but short clips transferred quickly, too. I also didn’t have any issues with the connection dropping when transferring batches of images. However, if I wanted to transfer a full shoot of hundreds of images (even just JPEGs), I would likely use a USB-C connection or a card reader to avoid potential issues and speed up the process. For a handful of images here and there, though, it worked very well.

There aren’t many options for video transfer settings.

There are only a few options for video imports. If you shoot with proxy recording turned on, you can choose whether to import only the proxy, only the original or both. The only other video import setting is related to Sony’s Shot Mark feature, which allows you to drop in-camera markers on video clips to flag important moments. If you’ve used Shot Mark, you can choose to have the imported clip cut around it (with options for 15-, 30-, or 60-second clips) or not cut at all.

Within the image transfer page, you’ll find limited features. You see star ratings applied in-camera and view basic EXIF information. Those same tools are all that’s available in the gallery page of the Creators’ App, too, but you can add star ratings here instead of only being able to see them. The only other additions are a sharing option that lets you share to apps on your phone, an upload button where you can choose to upload images to a designated folder and a delete button.

There are no editing features, so you’ll need to bring your images or videos into a different app for editing if that’s part of your workflow. However, there is a menu for managing Look Up Tables, or LUTs, letting you upload the color profiles to your camera from your phone. Unlike some other camera apps, however, Sony doesn’t offer a marketplace of LUTs within the app, so you’ll need to find those elsewhere and download them to your phone before transferring to the camera.

Remote control and live view

The remote control function gives you control over a lot of settings.

Another reason many people want a camera app is for remote camera controls, and the Sony Creators’ app does indeed offer those. Its list of controls is robust, including all the basics you’d expect, like camera mode, shutter speed, aperture, ISO and exposure compensation. You can also toggle between photo and video modes and change many other settings, including focus mode, drive mode, D-Range Optimizer, metering, pre-capture flash, image size, file format, movie file format, touch functions and many more.

While there are plenty of controls for the promise of easy remote shooting, the functionality and reliability are hit-or-miss. At times, it all runs smoothly with very responsive changes. The live view image accurately reflects what the camera is pointed at, it looks natural when I adjust what’s in the frame, and the focus changes rapidly when I tap on my phone’s display. In short, it works just how I would hope a remote control app would work.

However, that’s not always the situation. On a few occasions, live view was incredibly laggy. When that’s the case, unless you’re photographing still life scenes, it wouldn’t be usable, and even then, it would be quite frustrating. The exposure controls can also be slow to actually adjust to your changes at times, resulting in a fair amount of waiting around.

While most of the touch functions work, the “Touch Focus” option has only worked once for me.

Oddly, I haven’t been able to get the tap-to-focus feature to work again after my first attempt. It simply never changes the focus point, so that feature is completely unusable for me. Despite that, the other touch functions do seem to work as expected, including the ability to tap on the live view window to set auto exposure.

We didn’t experience the same lag and slowness with the iOS version of the app, and tap-to-focus worked as intended.

GPS sharing

You can share your phone’s location with your camera to attach GPS information to your images.

The Creators’ App enables GPS sharing, which means you can share your phone’s GPS information with the camera. That way, you can have locations attached to your images and videos, since cameras lack integrated GPS.

While the GPS sharing feature works seamlessly, it is a bit hidden. To find it, scroll down on the ‘Cameras’ page of the app and tap on the ‘Others’ menu option. From there, select ‘Setup’ and ‘Location Information Linkage.’ You will have to change some phone permissions to allow the camera to pull location info, but it’s very straightforward and quick.

Firmware and maintenance features

Firmware updates are easy with the Creators’ App

There are also some maintenance features available in the Creators’ App. If there are firmware updates available, the app will let you download and install them via your phone. It was very fast and easy to update firmware via the app, which means I would be much more likely to keep it updated than if I had to download it to my computer and jump through the required hoops for that process.

The Creators’ App also lets you save your camera’s settings either to your phone or the Creators’ Cloud, and then apply those settings to a camera. That way, if you need to reset your camera, you have all of your settings available and won’t need to remember what you usually use for each menu item. It could be a big time- and headache-saver. Saving settings only took a matter of seconds, too, so it’s very convenient. Unfortunately, you can only apply settings to the same camera model, so, for example, you wouldn’t be able to transfer settings from the a7 V to the a7 IV.

Lastly, Sony sometimes offers updates and new features via licenses rather than traditional firmware updates. The app doesn’t provide the ability to create those licenses, however, so you’ll need to obtain or purchase them through your Sony Creators’ Cloud account on the website, and then use the app’s License Management menu to install and activate the license on the camera.

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