I can’t believe it took this long for me to notice this: the Image Capture application that comes with Apple’s Macintosh computers got a huge but completely unheralded upgrade in Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.”

Among the feature-bumps: Image Capture’s tethered shooting capabilities are now much more comprehensive. In fact, they’re so beefy that I’ve revised my “No-Cost Remote Shooting for Nikon and Mac” post to highlight the improvements.

Image Capture certainly isn’t limited to Nikons, though — it works with almost any digital camera that can connect via USB in PTP mode, and that supports some industry-standard protocols for remote triggering.

[Another small but significant nicety: At the bottom of the device-list column, there's a "Sync" button that lets you set the internal clock of any supported camera to the computer's system time. This makes it much easier to set two cameras to match each other exactly - important if you later want to match up both cameras' photos by capture time.]

So, the new Image Capture is cool, it’s free, and it’s already on your Mac (assuming you’ve updated to Snow Leopard.) If you’ve ever thought of giving tethered shooting a try, there’s really no reason not to plug in your camera and see if it works!

But why would you want to shoot with your camera tethered to a laptop in the first place? There are plenty of reasons, but here’s a big one: With Image Capture, your camera saves every shot to your memory card as normal, and then downloads it to your laptop’s hard disk. That means that if your memory card somehow gets scrambled (hey, it happens) you’ve already got a backup copy on the laptop. And if your laptop falls off a cliff, you’ve still got the files on your memory card.

Call me a big ol’ scaredy cat, but this benefit alone is enough to inspire me to shoot tethered whenever possible — which means whenever I’ve got the laptop along, and when I’m using a camera that supports tethering (which my Nikons do but my Panasonic G1 does not… grrrrr…)