How to Turn on Bluetooth on a Nikon D3400 DSLR

A guide on how to turn on Bluetooth on the Nikon D3400 DSLR.

How to Turn on Bluetooth on Nikon D3400
Text & Photos By David Coleman
Last Revised & Updated:
Filed Under: DSLRs

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To connect the Nikon D3400 to your phone via Bluetooth, you need to do that through the SnapBridge app. That is, don’t establish the connection first through Bluetooth settings—you’ll see them grayed out.

Unlike its newer replacement (the D3500), the Nikon D3400 has some wireless capabilities. That said, it’s not a full-featured wireless capability. It doesn’t have wifi, so you can’t use it to control the camera remotely, for example. But it does have Bluetooth, which you can use to download images from your camera to your phone wirelessly.

Chances are that if you’re on this page you’re trying to turn on Bluetooth on your Nikon D3400 but the Bluetooth option is grayed out.

The reason is that you can only activate and connect the D3400’s Bluetooth through the SnapBridge mobile app. Put another way, to use Bluetooth on the D3400, you have to establish the connection through the SnapBridge app, not through the Bluetooth menu item on the camera.

How to Connect the Nikon D3400 to SnapBridge

On the camera’s menu, make sure that the Network Connection option is set to On and Airplane Mode is Off.

  • Setup > Network connection
  • Setup > Airplane Mode

You’ll need to download the SnapBridge app to your phone or tablet. Open the app.

Nikon D3400 Bluetooth 9

On your camera, go to Setup (the wrench/spanner icon) > Connect to smart device.

Nikon D3400 Bluetooth 10

While there’s still plenty of room to improve user-friendliness, between the camera and phone the onscreen prompts offer a reasonably good explanation of what you need to do in each step, but the gist is that you first need to pair the D3400 to the phone (through the SnapBridge app) and confirm that the pairing code matches. Then it should take you to the main screen where you can download and view images from the camera or enable the auto-download functionality.

Nikon D3400 Bluetooth 8

List of Paired Devices

You can find the list of paired Bluetooth devices under Menu > Setup (the wrench icon).

Nikon D3400 Bluetooth 4
Nikon D3400 Bluetooth 5

Bluetooth Status

You can see whether Bluetooth is enabled on the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink information display on the back screen. To access it, press the Info button on the back of the camera. The Bluetooth icon is at the top left.

Nikon D3400 Bluetooth 6

Things Worth Knowing

If you’re trying to connect your camera to the SnapBridge app, establish the connection directly through the SnapBridge app. That is, don’t establish the connection first through Bluetooth settings.

You can’t connect the camera to any random Bluetooth device, including, unfortunately, Bluetooth remotes or intervalometers.

You can put the D3400 into airplane mode, turning off wireless and Bluetooth connections. You can find that setting under Menu > Setup (the wrench icon).

If your camera light stays on when you’ve turned it off, it’s likely that you have Bluetooth enabled and set to transmit data to a wireless device. The Bluetooth stays active even with the main camera power off. You can turn off that functionality by disabling the “Send while off” feature under Setup > Bluetooth > Send while off. And you can turn off Bluetooth entirely by turning off the network connection (Setup > Bluetooth > Network connection).

SnapBridge can be—how shall we put this—a little frustrating to use. It is not my favorite app, and it often takes far too long and too many tries to establish a connection. I haven’t found a magic solution that solves the connection issues in all cases, but some things to try are:

  • Try again. It sounds obvious, but it often takes me 3 or 4 attempts to establish a connection successfully.
  • Delete the SnapBridge app and reinstall it.
  • Remove the camera’s connection from the phone’s Bluetooth memory.
  • Reset the camera (be warned that you’ll lose most settings doing this).

You can find the relevant section of the Nikon D3400 manual here.

Profile photo of David Coleman | Have Camera Will Travel | Washington DC-based Professional Photographer

Text & Photos by David Coleman

I'm a professional photographer based in Washington DC. Seven continents, up mountains, underwater, and a bunch of places in between. I've been shooting for 30+ years, and my my photos and time-lapse videos have appeared in a bunch of different publications from major newspapers to magazines and books, billboards, TV shows, professional sports stadiums, museums, and even massive architectural scrims covering world-famous buildings while they're being renovated. You can see some of my travel photography here and here.