We don’t show off many retail products here. But occasionally a product like this Eye Fi device becomes available. There are a few high end digital cameras that have WiFi built in so that they can automatically transfer pictures to your computer. Now for about $100 you can simply swap out your existing SD card and transform your picture taking experience. Just imagine no longer having to remove the card and plug it into a reader or mess with docking stations and USB cables. Kirk Yuhnke from Fox 13 News has put together a good review of the device that also shows off how you can have it automatically upload your images to your favorite picture site.
“The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless memory card. It automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.”
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I couldn’t tell whether there was oil on my glasses or if the reviewer doesn’t know how to focus a videocamera – it was the latter. Good Lord, how about having a bud come over and use a tripod.
Neat card, poorly executed review.
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so can you connect from any open wireless network, or only your own?
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Hi Mcphatty,
It will work on your network and some open networks. I am not sure if it will copy the files to your hard drive if you are on an open network or just upload them to the site you selected though.
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I have the card…
Cool concept – except some “quirks” that are easily forgivable:
Not high speed card – it cannot be used for 640×480 x30fps video
Cannot specify a different naming convention for date/directory names it creates
Not sure how to easily use open wifi networks as you have to specify SSIDs in setup
MUST be on internet to use card
If Eye.fi goes away will card persist to work without access to them… that’s the magic question…
Otherwise great concept and I’m using it to upload photos to a directory which is where I have a “photo frame” that loads photos from a network/samba share. This way I can take a photo and then have it show up on the photo frame within a minute or two as it cycles thru photos.
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Jerimiah,
Good question: Until someone hacks this thing to do otherwise, it relies entirely on the Eye-Fi servers to operate. The card is pretty dumb – it is programmed to upload your photos to Eye-Fi’s servers only. The transfer to the various hosting pages is done on the back end: eye-fi pushes the photos from their machines to the hosting service. The transfer back to your computer is done by the Eye-Fi software client pulling the data from Eye-fi servers.
If eye-fi servers are hacked, the client can potentially download anything from eye-fi – a security risk.
When (not if, but when) this is hacked properly, you’ll be able to drop a configuration file on the device that allows it to connect to your specified FTP server instead of Eye-fi’s. Your photos won’t have to leave your local network.
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I just got this and it works with my LOCAL NETWORK. I have a higher end Canon camera and it will send the JPG images to my computer no problem. Not the fastest but great for previewing my studio and lighting work quickly before I start to shoot a set. I would recommend it for sure.