Eye-Fi truly makes your photos fly (and you can win one)

Eye-Fi truly makes your photos fly (and you can win one)

Eye-Fi truly makes your photos fly (and you can win one)

I believe that as some point in the future, digital cameras, mobile phones and GPS navigation devices will merge into one connected multi-purpose device. You’ll be able to put images and videos online as soon as your take them, and tweet about them without having to look for cables or having to remove the memory card from your GPS-cam-phone-gadget-thingy. We may not be there quite yet, but the Eye-Fi card definitely gives your current digital camera a head start.

Eye-Fi is a wireless SD memory card with up to 4GB of memory PLUS built-in Wi-Fi. Just turn your camera on to effortlessly transfer photos and videos from your camera to your computer and favorite web sharing site (like Flickr & Facebook).

No more cables

I have two small kids, so I take tons of pictures. Every few months I collect them from the three(!) digital cameras my wife and I own and put them into Picasa. I hate having to open up the battery compartments to take out the memory cards and putting them into my computer’s card reader. I know it’s a major improvement over film rolls, but it’s still a lot of fuzz. I’ve given up on cables altogether because I have so many devices it takes forever to find the right one.

By the time I get the images on my PC it makes little sense to upload them to Flickr. Flickr to me is like a blog, but with photos. If it’s old, it shouldn’t be in your photostream. That’s why I thought the Eye-Fi would be great for me. The Eye-Fi is an SD(HC) memory card that stores your images like any other card would do. But it also has a built-in wireless network adapter which it uses to instantly publish your images online. I’d been meaning to try it, so I was very happy when they recently sent me a review unit.

Testing with the Canon PowerShot SX110 IS

I was amazed by how easy it was to set up. the Eye-Fi comes bundled with a small card reader, and the software you need is on the card itself. It’s very self-explanatory and it took me two minutes to set up te card for use with my wifi network. It then instructed me to pop the card into a camera and take some pictures. That’s when I hit a little snag. None of my not-so-new cameras would accept SDHC cards. Fortunately, this provided me with the perfect excuse to borrow my sister in law’s brand new Canon SX110 and use it to play with the Eye-Fi. And I found both of them to be very impressive.

How it works

When you first put the card into your PC, you enter your network’s details and your account info for the services you want to use. I set it up to publish images to Flickr and videos to YouTube. Once that is done you can turn off your computer. Pop the card back into your camera, and it’ll connect to your wifi and upload as you take new images. This happens quite fast with stills, but I found videos to take a little while. The problem with this is that the card needs to be powered to work. If your camera goes to sleep after some time to preserve battery power you may need to dive into the device’s settings to set a longer timeout.

Eye-Fi Manager

If you do leave your computer on, you’ll be able to track the card’s activity. Seconds after you press the shutter, the image pops up in the bundled software, is stored on your PC for safe keeping. Eye-Fi automatically backs up and organizes your photos and videos on your computer in date-based folders. If your camera is out of your network’s range the images will be processed when you get back within about 30 mtr of your access point. If nothing else, this makes it the easiest way to get images from the camera. But there’s more.

Twitter notifications

One feature I particularly liked was the ability to set up Twitter notifications. If I’d had this card at WordCamp a few weeks ago I could have set it up so it’d use the venue’s wifi to upload my photos to flickr and tweet about them using the event’s hashtag. All I’d need to do was take snapshots.

Impressed

The Eye-Fi is one of the most innovative things I’ve ever used. It’s amazing that they’ve fit a wifi adapter inside something as small as an SD card. It provides a glimpse into a future where all devices are connected and you can buy one right now.

You can win one!

Here’s your chance to make your photos fly too. The Eye-Fi people are giving away 12 Eye-Fi cards to reader of this and other blogs. You can enter by doing one of two things.

• Leave a comment on this post
• Tweet a message containing the hashtag “#eye-fi” with a link back to this post