Eye-Fi: Wirelessly Upload and Archive Photos
January 21st, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 4 Comments
Whether you frequently work with digital photos online or manage a lot of personal photos, one of the very best new gadgets to have on your radar is the Eye-Fi card. At January’s Consumer Electronics Show it won Yahoo!’s Last Gadget Standing competition, and it got a Best of Show award at the Macworld show the following week. I’ve been using it, and especially if you have a home Wi-Fi network and don’t currently have a Wi-Fi enabled camera, it’s very useful.
The Eye-Fi card (an SD card with Wi-Fi integrated) sends photos wirelessly to your PC or Mac, and they’re automatically saved to a folder that you pre-define. The receiving computer does need to be running Eye-Fi Manager software, but other than that requirement all hassles surrounding getting your photos from your camera to your computer are removed. The Eye-Fi Manager software can take care of routing your photos to your favorite photo sharing sites online, such as Flickr, without requiring you to worry about logging in or passwords. You can also take advantage of Eye-Fi Service, which will store your photos and deliver them to your turned-off computer the next time you turn it on.
If you’ve taken a photo that’s too large for your destination site, the Eye-Fi card will automatically resize it. The routing of the photos is secure, and you can choose to have your photos uploaded to your home computers as well as online sites. There is a list of supported destination sites available online.
In my experience, the Eye-Fi card is an easy way to make sure that you don’t leave photos sitting on your camera, never to be archived. It’s also nice not to hassle with cables and docks. It costs $99.99, and you can get it at numerous retailers, such as Wal-Mart, or order it from Amazon, Costco.com, Buy.com and other sites.
Do you wirelessly upload photos, and if so what’s your solution?
4 Comments Post your own comment
Digital Photographers - Transfer Photos Using Wi-Fi Memory Card | Self-Organizing Randomness says: January 22nd, 2008 4:36am
[...] of Samuel Dean is a great review on the new Eye-Fi [...]
A Passion For ‘Puters » Blog Archive » I want, I want, I want…. says: January 22nd, 2008 5:41pm
[...] too expensive (unless more than one person wanted to go together to get it for me…), but the Eye-Fi looks to be the coolest little gadget I’ve seen in a while. I’m seriously considering [...]
joevideo says: January 27th, 2008 12:58pm
hi all. i’ve had a couple of problems with this card working. i returned my first one and am on the 2nd one. it is not compatible at all with one of my cameras and seems to work sporadically with the 2nd. careful before you buy it that your camera is compatible.
Web Worker Daily » Archive New Devices and Applications on the Wi-Fi Front « says: February 1st, 2008 4:01pm
[...] all of the Wi-Fi news from January was about 802.11n technology though. The Eye-Fi card (an SD card with integrated 802.11g Wi-Fi) was one of the big hits of the Consumer Electronics [...]