Nikon D5600 WIFI and Bluetooth problems.

Jon W

New member
A few days ago I bought a new D5600. I am having serious issues with pairing the camera and my phone with Bluetooth or connecting with the cameras WIFI using the phone.
The phone is a Samsung Galaxy S7, the Android is ver. 7. The phones WIFI and Bluetooth work perfectly fine as far as I can tell, the problem does seem to be with the camera. The camera does have an SD card.

I will describe both problems in detail, hopefully there is a fix and I have missed something. However the more I have looked around for a fix without success the more I am inclined to think I may have received a lemon, the problem seems to be hardware and not configuration. I would appreciate opinions on rather or not I should just send the camera back for exchange.

The problem with the WIFI is simply that the camera does not show up on the phones list of available WIFI's. I have reset the WIFI on the camera, made sure the battery is fully charged, rebooted the phone, made sure the WIFI on the phone and camera is on, turned off the Bluetooth on one or the other and both, and done this all at different locations just in case there was interference I was not aware of all, with zero success.

The Bluetooth problem is a little more complicated, I get some communication between the devices but then the camera will not communicate with the phone and the pairing fails. I am using the SnapBridge app on the phone. I get as far as a message that says the camera and the phone would like to pair, I hit OK on both. At this point the message on the camera says that the devices are paired. On snapBridge (phone) the message is "waiting for response from camera" and after 20 seconds are so, (I suppose I am getting a time out) the message is "Pairing has failed". I can speed this process up by starting to proceed on the camera answering the questions about configuration, as soon as I answer one of them the pairing fails. There is no reason given why the pairing has failed.

I have attempted remedy by going through the process at the Nikon page that the help icon on the camera leads to. The only remote problem that I might have according to this page is interference, I have attempted a location change away from possible interference with no success. I have also attempted other remedies, turning Bluetooth of and on, on both devices, turning the WIFI off in case that was a source of interference, making sure I was paired with nothing else on the phone, making sure I had no other programs on the phone that might be the cause, cold boots on both devices, reinstalling SnapBridge, all with zero success. Zero success means in this case nothing has changed at all since the first time I attempted pairing, no attempted remedies got me any closer or changed the problem to any degree.

Any thoughts? Thanks.
 

cwgrizz

Senior Member
Challenge Team
Welcome to the forum. I'm not sure about the D5600, but with the D5300 (if my memory serves me correctly) I had to have the WMU app on the phone. I never had the Snapbridge, so not sure about that. I am not familiar with the D5600, at all. Ha!
 

Jon W

New member
The D5600 is the next generation of the D5500, maybe more aptly described as a version upgrade. Some minor improvements, but the major change is that the WIFI and Bluetooth are built in. I did the WMU app with the Wi-Fi which I forgot to mention in the OP.
 

cwgrizz

Senior Member
Challenge Team
The D5600 is the next generation of the D5500, maybe more aptly described as a version upgrade. Some minor improvements, but the major change is that the WIFI and Bluetooth are built in. I did the WMU app with the Wi-Fi which I forgot to mention in the OP.
I would have hoped that Nikon would have improved the WIFI system on the D5500 & D5600. The WIFI is built in to the D5300 also, but it has always been temperamental for some to use. I only tried it once or twice just to see if it worked. Hopefully someone else will be able to come in here and shed some light on your problem.
 

nickt

Senior Member
Try to test if the camera is broadcasting wifi. I have an app called wifi analyzer by farproc. It gives you a nice graphic of all wifi networks and signal strength that your phone sees. Or just bring the camera near a computer that has wireless and see if it can see the wifi created by the camera. The network name is a big long name, but it says Nikon in there somewhere. Connection problems aside, simply turning wifi on in the camera should produce a detectable wifi nikon-named network. If the camera lets you turn wifi on but you confirm the camera is not broadcasting, then its probably bad.
 

Jon W

New member
I found the solution, however it is far away in the time and space of Nikon programmers. This is what I found out, they are working on an upgrade for the camera to improve wireless with Android (7 I assume) and this will fix the problem. Of course nobody knows if this is going to break next time Android is updated.

I tried nickT's suggestion of looking on my computer WIFI list to see if the camera showed up, it did not. So I concluded the camera was a lemon and called Nikon where I was transferred to tech support. I was not happy with the conversation and the tech guy was kind of dense. He really could not offer me a solution beyond that he "believes that an upgrade to the camera software for Android connectivity was coming soon" and that they had already released an upgrade for IOS. I was not a satisfied customer! I sort of hung up on them after we started going in circles and he wanted to try to take me through the pairing just one more time. I was going to return the camera.

Then I decided to pull out my IPad since he had mentioned that the upgrade was already done for IOS. It worked on the IPad, not great mind you but I could see that the camera was not a lemon. Not that I want to use the IPad, I only bought the IPad for the Phantom Drone I have.

The only anticipated use I had in mind for wireless was being able to use my phone as a remote for the camera, when that little motion of pushing the shutter button can screw up your pic. Unfortunately the D5600 does not include infrared sensors like previous D5xx models. I would of been perfectly happy picking up a simple shutter remote, but you can't buy one that works with the D5600.

I did not buy the Nikon for the wireless, and I really did not want to return it and go with something else. While I am not happy about the wireless thing, I am glad I was able to discover if the camera was a lemon or not. hopefully in the future the wireless on the Nikon D5600 will work with the most popular phone and OS in the world.
 

nickt

Senior Member
Interesting. I don't have a d5600 and my s7 is at Android 6. I'm just trying to fathom what they could do different in the camera to make the wifi visible or not. Networking is not my thing though. It looks like they did release a new d5600 firmware TODAY for:

"Fixed an issue that resulted in unreliable connections between the camera and the iOS 10.2 version of the SnapBridge app."

The wifi on my d7200 is visible to anything that can see wifi, but I really don't have a clue if the d5600 works differently. I know its harder than it should be to get these things talking. Thanks for coming back and sharing what you learned.
 

Jon W

New member
I don't really know what they are thinking but I have a few thoughts. They are trying to be a little fancy and proprietary with the camera and their silly SnapBridge app. The thing only works with "Smart Devices" which seems to mean IOS devices and Android devices, well Android devices when they get around to update for the latest Android Ver. So it seems to me that they had to write some code to disable the Bluetooth and WIFI a little bit, to keep it proprietary to their apps.

Look at the way SnapBridge works, you automatically copy pics to your phone at a limited size of 2 megs, if you go to full size it takes forever, and if you want to copy a movie you need to activate WIFI. This requires coding that limits the connection to just doing a few things. Compare that to a phone where if you like you can just look at the phone as another drive on your PC and drag and drop files. You can also get various syncing software to automate the task of keeping files synced between devices. Does not seem to work out well for them, you look at reviews for SnapBridge they all say it is kind of crappy software, and it gets ratings that average below three stars. And even worse they have software that cant do a simple pairing with devices unless they spend a lot of time money and effort on a version upgrade, because they are trying to be fancy and proprietary. I suspect they are not writing modern software for this app or the camera, by modern software I mean Agile coding and SOLID principles, that makes the code easy to modify and extend without breaking.

I am wondering why there are no third party apps, at least nothing easy to find. I looked at the Nikon site and they do have SDK's, over thirty SDK's. For those who don't know, SDK is Standard Developers Kit, which is code that an app developer would use to access programmatically functions of the camera. While they have SDK's, they do not offer any kind of direct technical support for the SDK's. Searching around the net it seems that no third party has bothered to write an app. Seems no third party has bothered to write an app for any of the other camera makers either. App developers need a large user base to develop an app that has a reasonable price point. If they have to write over thirty versions of an app, or make the app configurable for over thirty versions of the SDK, they have a expensive and difficult time making an app for just Nikon cameras. (Might explain the buggy SnapBridge app). To take it a step further if you wanted to write an app for DSL cameras in general even something that just controlled a couple of basic functions like focusing and pushing the shutter button remotely would quickly become unwieldy to write as an app, and they would not likely be able to meet a reasonable price point for a simple app. I will end this rant by just saying that the camera manufacturing industry would do a lot better if they developed standards for at least the most common camera functions so perhaps third party software to access any digital camera would become feasible.
 

kaminskico

New member
I am not one to normally post, but I found what was keeping me from pairing a d5600 to a Samsung Note5. I had to go into Settings --> Connections --> Phone Visibility and enable that setting for the pairing process only. After the devices were paired I was able to turn that setting back off. I hope that helps anyone having problems.
 

patrick in memphis

Senior Member
hi everyone. i got my d5600 yesterday, and i got the snapbridge app working on my s7. i had to delete the connection under bluetooth on the camera also delete the connection to the camera in the app. manually type the ssid into your phone under the wifi available(add network) and make sure that everything is capps sensetive. then click on security and match the type and password then click ok. it wont show up in your available wifi, but its there. now close the app and turn cam off then on and open snapbridge,click third tab to the right (looks like a camera with an arrow)and click remote photography, it usually takes a minute but will eventually connect.
 

golden

New member
My issue with SnapBridge is that it resets my D5600's M settings when I invoke Remote Photography. This is intensely annoying for nighttime low light photography.
 

shootwithgrey

New member
Did anyone find a solution to this? I bought a D5600 last year around October. I had SnapBridge on my old phone (Samsung Note 5) and it always paired fine. I got an iPhone 8+ this year and the pairing with my DSLR is complete AIDS. There are days when it does pair and my photos download and then there are days when my iPhone says it is connected to my DSLR with Bluetooth but my SnapBridge tells me otherwise saying my camera’s WiFi is off or my camera is connected to a different device. It’s either the iOS application for SnapBridge is complete SHIT (no wonder the rating are lower than my GPA) or my iPhone is just trying to fk around with me.
 

Guateblue

New member
I just got a D5600 today and have been trying to get it set up. First problem was that there was not even an option to turn the WiFi on. That was solved through updating the firmware from 1.03 to 1.10.

Unfortunately the problem I am still faced with is that WMU still returns an error "Live view cannot be started. Check the camera" There seems to be nothing wrong with the camera and all the other functions between snapbridge and the camera seem to work. Anyone overcome this? The phone is a Samsung Galaxy J7 pro
 

ChuckT

Senior Member
This is something I have been dealing with the past week. I cannot, under any circumstances get the wireless to connect to my phone. I have tried using an old Samsung S7 and it still isn't picking up a signal. The other thing I've noticed is the battery drains incredibly fast. I even tried connecting to my latest gen iPod touch. It seems like the camera is just not broadcasting a wireless signal to pick up
 

BigHair

New member
I could not figure this out until someone mentioned WMU.

Follow these steps in order...

Download and Install Firmware: latest firmware for the Nikon D5600
As of today 1/30/2021 The Latest Firmware 1.10 updated from 1.03 (Windows or MAC)
Follow directions exactly!
https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/download/fw/326.html

Download and Install phone app: WMU Nikon Wireless Mobile Utility app (Windows or MAC)
https://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/wireless-mobile-utility-app.page

Download and Install phone app: SnapBridge app version 2.7 as of today 1/30/2021 (Windows or MAC)

https://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/snapbridge-app.page

This fixed my Bluetooth and Wifi connection issues with the Nikon D5600. WMU app was necessary to fix.
 
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