I picked up an Eye-Fi wireless SD card, it’s a card with 2GB of storage and it can automatically upload your photos as you take them to your computer and/or services like Flickr. I take a lot of photos in the workshop here of electronics, projects and things for site so I figured this might be worth the $100 price. It usually takes me 10 minutes or so to take an SD card out, transfer photos and then up to 15 minutes or so to upload most of them to Flickr or just keep them on my machine. The packaging is fun, you pul a tab and box slides open, the Wi-Fi SD card has the installation software on it and in less than 5 minutes it was set up and uploading to Flickr and my computer. The software (on my Mac) talks to the card and their web site for configuring it all. I’d like to see more advanced controls for Flickr like titles, tags and disabling privacy settings – but that’s all software and web updates so maybe this review will move that along. I’d like to give it an email address so I could send to people, or to blog services like Tumblr.
One of the reasons the Eye-Fi is appealing to is that in the past I’ve used Kodak’s Wi-Fi camera as well as Nikon’s but I felt trapped by the way they force you to use their services. Things have changed a bit lately but one of the things I didn’t like at the time was that camera manufacturers like to force you to use their weird photo service. The Kodak Wi-Fi camera was fun but it didn’t send the photos to Flickr, I needed to do a silly workaround-hack. I think with something like the Eye-Fi you’ll always have more choices and as you retire out a camera the Wi-Fi ability is card based, not camera based.
This is a quick 1 hour review, I’ll post more as I play around with it. Oh, at Macworld Eye-Fi announced that later this month there will be an update so it works directly with iPhoto. I don’t use iPhoto but lots of people do so I’m curious how much better it will be. There are already 40,000+ photos tagged with “Eye-Fi” on Flickr now, they’re mostly babies but I suppose worth checking out – Link.
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