Summary Nowadays, there occurs a great demand for effective transmission of video. It is necessary to design an efficient transmission approach to transmit a huge amount of data in wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs). But the routing based on wireless multimedia sensor networks is not much popular like other wireless sensor networks. Due to its peculiar features, it finds few troubles in directly applying the resolutions into the WMSNs. The work outlined in this paper is aimed at minimizing the delay and expected transmission count (ETX) cost of the QoS requirements. Moreover, this paper also proposes a hybrid salp swarm–firefly (HSSFF) approach which is the integration of two algorithms, namely, salp swarm and firefly optimization algorithms. The HSSFF approach employs in obtaining an optimal routing path with minimum end‐to‐end delay and less ETX value. Here, the fitness function for Simulink evaluation is twofold. We also presented the simulation results for two scenarios, and the comparative analysis is carried out to determine the best optimal routing path. Therefore, the simulation results describe that the HSSFF approach provides better performance on various nine test functions.