Eye-Fi, Inc: Photo Uploading Wirelessly

In their press release a few days ago, Eye-Fi Inc. announced an upgrade to their popular memory cards for digital cameras. 

Because I take a few or more photos on a daily basis, and I've always wanted a way to wirelessly upload my images without the hassle of making a wired connection to my camera or the media card reader. This wired process is such a waste of time, especially when taking day-to-day shots around in and around my house or when doing studio portrait photos. Plus, I've always thought that being able to wirelessly upload photos to my laptop or to a photo Web sharing site like Flickr might be useful as business feature for event photography shoots.

The company offers three types of SD memory cards that you can read about here. I purchased from Circuit City the model that allows you to wirelessly upload your computer or iPhoto, and to a Web photo sharing site like Flickr, Costco, or Photobucket.  

Using the Eye-Fi card requires connecting to a wireless network. Because my internet connection was made using an Aiport Extreme Card installed in my Mac Pro, I had to purchase an external router in order to use the Eye-Fi card. After going through the steps of setting up and configuring my card to my Wi-Fi account, I was good to go. For the most part the card works as advertised. There are however a few asterisk points that should be noted. You cannot wirelessly upload RAW or movie files with the device. You can certainly shoot RAW photos or movies with the cards but they won't export those files wirelessly. 

You also can't choose which photos get uploaded to your computer or Web sharing site. So if you're in the range of your configured network connection, all the images you shoot will upload. I tried deleting a few photos immediately after they were shot, and even still those images were exported to my computer; though a few turned out to be partial uploads because they were deleted before the entire process could be completed.  

Also you do not receive notification that the uploading process is complete, but the Eye-Fi application in your computer's menu bar indicates when the uploading process is taking place. This will help you remember to turn off your camera after uploads are completed. It seems possible that the company could develop a Growl notification plug-in to aid this process.  

Now for the pluses.  

After arriving home from short photo session this morning, all I had to do was turn my camera back on and the save images instantly started uploading to my computer. I previously created a little AppleScript and Automator folder action that automatically opens up the designated folder for my Eye-Fi imported photos. I could have configured photos to go directly to iPhoto or even to Aperture using another script, but I decided just having the photos sent to the designated folder was more practical. This way I could discard unwanted images from the folder before importing into Aperture the ones I wanted to keep. I also use my Picasa account has a sort of an off-home site backup of these uploaded photos.  

It takes about thirty seconds to upload a single 1.21MB image to my computer and network account, and another minute for the same photo to be uploaded to my Picasa Web account. The Oct 5th update of the cards will supposedly double the speed of the wireless transfer from the current 350KB/s to 700KB/s. Of course, while the transfer process is taking place, you can keep on shooting. Your camera has to remain on during the upload process. The Eye-Fi manager on my computer has crashed a few times during the upload process. Not sure the cause for that. 

Also in the upcoming update, Apple's MobileMe members who use an EyeFi card will be able wirelessly send photos from their camera directly to their MobileMe Gallery, which in turn can then be viewed by friends and family on the Web, iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV.  

While there are many desired features and limitations for this product and service, the Eye-Fi cards will have to do until digital cameras are created with the wireless feature already installed. This product is great for bloggers, travelers, and frequent shooters like myself who simply want to get their photos to the computers or photo sharing site without the hassle of a wired connection.