To begin, press the Wi-Fi button on the camera and select New Connection > Send Images While Recording > PC. The Via Network option connects to a wireless network and is for sending images with the computer connected to that network, which works if you're at home or in a studio with a wireless router. The Direct > Manual Connection option shows the camera's SSID (network name) and password to use for the computer to connect to the camera; the computer will connect directly to the camera, independently of any wireless network. However, this is where things get tricky.
On Windows 10, if you simply select the camera network in the wireless network menu, it'll get stuck with "Checking network requirements" and you can't actually connect to the camera's Wi-Fi signal. It took a while, but I ultimately came across this Panasonic article, which describes how to work around the problem. Essentially, you need to manually add the network on your PC. The steps in that article will work, but you can do the same using the Windows Settings UWP app: in Network & Internet > Wi-Fi, click Manage known networks, then click Add a new network. From there, select WPA2-Personal AES for the security type, then enter the camera's SSID and password.
Now that the computer is connected to the camera, the camera will try to find devices on the network. In my experience, this doesn't work, so simply press the Set button on the camera to cancel this process and manually enter the computer's network name.
The camera will then prompt for a username and password. This is for logging onto the computer itself; you may want to create a separate local user account on the PC specifically for this purpose as the camera will automatically store it in its connection history and you may not want your actual Windows logon credentials stored in the camera. Assuming you've entered the credentials correctly, the camera will log onto your PC and list any shared folders on it.
At this point, you can create a new folder on your computer and share it in Windows. This is where things can get tricky again: the name of the folder on the drive and the name of the network share need to match, and the user account must have permission to write to it. If, for example, you created the share in your user folder but the camera's using a different account to access it, it'll fail (the camera will return a connection error before disconnecting) unless you set both the network share permissions and the folder's NTFS permissions to grant write access to the folder by that user account. Nonetheless, the shared folder can be located anywhere on the system, including on an external drive, as long as the folder name, share name, and permissions are correct. You can delete and recreate the folder and network share between sessions, and the camera will be able to write photos to it the next time you use the Wi-Fi feature on the camera.
You're now all set. The camera will now send photos to the shared folder on your computer as you shoot. It'll write them to the camera's memory card first, then queue them for transfer to the shared folder. On my Panasonic FZ1000, the transfer process can be somewhat slow, but being able to send photos from your camera to your computer, as you shoot and independently from any wireless network, can be a very valuable feature because it eliminates the need to remove the memory card from the camera (or plug the camera into the computer) and copy them to the PC. By the time you're finished shooting, the photos will most likely be on your computer, and you can start working on them right away.
I might expand this blog post with more details later, but this should address common problems you might run into when using this feature. Happy shooting!
Draco
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