Never Plug Your Camera into Your PC Again with Eye-FI
Posted by: dragonblogger // Category: TechnologyDisclaimer: This was a sponsored post, commissioned by Eye-Fi, by way of Izea SocialSpark. I was provided with a 4GB Eye-FI card and compensated to test the product and share my thoughts and opinions. The words and opinions are mine and mine alone.
I spent the last few days testing the new Eye-Fi card that I received and am completely amazed by how easy it is to use and how well it works. The only caveat is that my Canon Digital Rebel XT only accepts Compact Flash cards and I had to borrow my wife’s Nikon camera which uses SD cards to perform my testing. (I have since read there are Compact Flash adapters which allow the Eye-Fi to work with some older Compact Flash camera’s).
The Eye-Fi is a kit that comes with a USB card reader and an SD card that has built in Wi-Fi. After you configure the Eye-Fi with the USB card reader and use it to setup the wireless network on the card, as long as the camera is within wireless range it will automatically and wirelessly download photos off of your camera and onto your PC. It will even upload the photos to a photo sharing service of your choice, and look at the amount of photo services that Eye-Fi supports at the time of this article:
Installing the Eye-Fi was a breeze, you just plug the USB adapter (with the SD Card plugged into it) into your computer and open the USB drive folder, run the windows installer and the program installs in seconds.
When you are done you are asked to create an Eye-Fi account and choose several options including where on your PC the photos will download to from your camera, and which photo sites you want to upload to. It is all very easy to configure and setup.
After you have configured your settings, you are ready to perform your first test of the Eye-Fi card. You unplug the card from the computer and put the SD card into your camera. Take photos and watch as they instantly download to your computer, you get a popup showing the photos downloading and you even get an email sent to you showing you all files that have uploaded with little snapshots of the images uploaded.
When you log into your Eye-Fi homepage it shows you recent activity, and from here you can adjust your options and settings.
Here is what I really enjoy about the Eye-Fi:
- I never need to plug my wife’s camera into the computer USB again, it will always download the images to the PC automatically and put them in a folder of my choosing so I can sort them later.
- I now can auto upload my photos to a web album instantly at the same time they download to my computer.
- Images remain on the camera, so you don’t have to worry about accidental deletes when images are downloaded
- You can change your options anytime and adjust between photo shoots.
- 4GB is a tremendous amount of storage room on an SD card, and it will wirelessly download video clips too if your camera takes video.
- If you bring it to a friends house or another place with wireless signal you need to at least plug the USB adapter into someones computer and get a computer to run the Eye-Fi software. It won’t just piggy back on any network and upload images to your photo sharing site so you don’t have to worry about photo’s uploading or crossing an unfamiliar network or computer.
- I learned after the fact that you can set a configuring in Eye-Fi manager that only uploads photo’s or videos that are protected/locked. This will allow you to only automatically upload photos and videos that you want, instead of everything in your camera. You can read more about this here: http://www.eye.fi/blog/control-what-leaves-your-camera
Here are some of the features that are a little tedious:
- Eye-Fi only supports SD format, and my Canon Digital Rebel XT uses Compact Flash, as a result my wife is going to be the primary user of the card that I received. But she also takes far more photos than me and shares most of them for business purposes. (They do may an adapter for Compact Flash with limited support and range)
You can watch more about the Eye-Fi and what it can do for you here:
I highly recommend the Eye-Fi to my readers and anyone who has a Digital Camera that accepts an SD card, it makes it effortless to backup the images to your computer or share them in an online gallery.
The EYE-FI Giveaway contests is now open.
IZEA is giving away a free Eye-Fi 4GB SD Card to 12 lucky winners, and you can read full Eye-Fi Contest Rules for all participating blogs.
Here is how to enter the contest:
- You get 1 entry for each comment you leave on this blog post about the Eye-Fi.
- You get 1 entry for tweeting the following “You could win an Eye-Fi 4GB SD Card, read and comment 2 enter -> http://bit.ly/4h1RdL”
This contest starts on November 17th 2009 and runs until December 13th 2009, so get your entries in and you could win an Eye-Fi 4GB SD Card which is a great gift to win just before the Holidays.
Update:
The contest is now closed, IZEA will be picking winners. Stay tuned for announcement.
-Dragon Blogger
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Tags: eye-fi, eye-fi card, eye-fi geotagging, eye-fi review, eye-fi reviews, eye-fi sd, eye-fi sd card, eyefi, eyefi card, eyefi compact flash, eyefi reviews, eyefi sd, eyefi video, eyefi wifi, eyefi wireless, using eye-fi, using eyefi, wireless camera pics, wireless sd card
November 17th, 2009 at 6:20 am
It always amazes me that it’s possible to include a wifi antenna (and whatever else might be necessary) in a card that’s so small – and then even include storage capacity too!
Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Google To Rank Sites Based On Speed? Matt Cutts Explains
November 17th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Thanks for the detailed review. We would like to let your readers know that we have a Selective Transfer option that will ONLY transfer photos that you mark on your camera using the lock/protect feature.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.eye.fi/blog/control-what-leaves-your-camera
November 17th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Fantastic, I will amend to post to include this information. I wasn’t aware of this during my testing.
November 17th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
One question, will it still transfer the files to your computer and just not upload them to your photo sharing, or with this option selected will it not download the photo’s at all from the card unless they are locked/protected?
November 17th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
With the selective transfer option, only the photos and videos you mark with the lock/protect feature will be wirelessly transferred from your camera. So, for example, if you take 100 photos and only mark 10 of them, then only 10 photos will be delivered to your computer and your web destination.
November 17th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
That’s good, would be even better if there were an option to let all files download to computer, but also only submit the “specific locked” ones to photo sharing site. That way all your stuff is automatically downloaded, and only the selected ones go into public sharing.
Either way the card is fantastic, do you know if the compact flash adapter works well or is it not worth buying?
November 18th, 2009 at 8:20 am
With the Eye-Fi, can you have it upload automatically to a folder on an SMB share? Or can it only upload to a local folder?
November 18th, 2009 at 9:11 am
You configure it through the Eye-Fi website which folder you want to upload to, it does require you to put in a drive letter F:\ for example, I don’t think you can put a share name like \\shared\folder, so if it is a mapped shared drive it will work. Eye-Fi support team might be able to answer more clearly.
November 18th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Yes if it is a mapped drive, it will work.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
I did this review as well. I like how you explained all the screens and how easy it was to set up. I had some major disappointments with the features of the card and the uploading to sites online. Like say only being able to post to ONE site at a time, weaksauce. Then again I use my photos in much different ways and this pretty much is a novelty card for me. Liked your review though.
BenSpark´s last blog ..Macro Perceptor Autobot Scientist
November 20th, 2009 at 7:58 am
You are do much more photography than the common user, I actually don’t use the photo album upload myself. The card alone is worth it just to download the photo’s to your computer wirelessly, so you don’t have to constantly plug and unplug a USB cable to connect your camera. The fact that you can set it to only upload select photo’s was a nice feature I didn’t know about. Ask the developers, I am sure it wouldn’t be terribly hard for them to implement an upload to multiple photo sharing sites simultaneously.
November 20th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Randhir – what if you’re using a Mac? I assume you can choose /Volumes/HomeServer/Photos or whatever as your folder, but that would fail if the server wasn’t currently mounted. Being able to upload directly to your WHS (or any system with an SMB mount), without using a host computer, would be a really nice feature.
November 20th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Hi April, yes the server will have to be mounted and available for it to work. I have noted your SMB request. In the meanwhile, we do upload to FTP servers if that helps you out.
On comment #6, we have just implemented that feature. Check out the video tutorial here: http://www.eye.fi/blog/selective-share
November 22nd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
whoa, this is great.. An early christmas bonanza for all the bloggers out there. Thanks for this dragonblogger. ^^
November 24th, 2009 at 8:20 am
I read this post before and left a message, anyway, I think I missed clicking on the submit content.
I like geeky stuff and this one is definitely one! I do hope this is available in my country too. he eh he. A very nice Christmas gift!
The wireless capability like beaming the pictures and videos, the effortless syncing between computer and camera, and lots and lots more, what can anyone ask for.
Z
November 28th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I’d love to win one of these eye-fi cards, specially now that the christmas hollidays are coming, it would make my life much easier to upload all the christmas pics faster to my computer.
November 29th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Thanks for entering the contest, good luck.
December 1st, 2009 at 10:59 pm
This is pretty cool, Justin! I’d love to win one (to give as a gift, since my camera takes XD cards) – just one question, though: If you’re uploading directly from the camera, does it drain the batteries quickly? That’s always been a drawback to uploading directly from a camera to the PC using a USB cable (rather than removing the memory card and inserting it into a card reader). Is it pretty fast?
Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..5 Fun WordPress Plug-Ins You CAN Live Without – But Won’t Want To
December 1st, 2009 at 11:05 pm
The pic uploads are very fast, I take 4 megapixel pics most of the time and it uploads them all at the wireless G speed, so average about 20-30 mpbs which is quite fast. I haven’t noticed any battery issues since you only turn the camera on for a few moments when you are within range of your PC, let it finish and then shut your camera off. If you are taking pictures at your house, they download within a moment or two of taking the pictures.
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:22 am
Does this work for Mac as well? I only see mention of PC compatibility. This would be great and save me from having to find my usb cord every time I want to upload an image.
Anne´s last blog ..Super Quick Update
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:21 am
Yes it supports Mac OS X 10.4 and above.
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:31 pm
I’d like to win one of these as I see that it works with Whrrl which I use a lot as well as Facebook and other sites. My camera’s site to load photos takes forever and I can’t use another program or go online when using it. I hate wasting time!
ConnieFoggles´s last blog ..Mom Surgery Tomorrow
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:28 am
Thanks for joining the contest, I am hoping several people win from my blog.
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:33 pm
I tweeted this – http://twitter.com/ConnieFoggles/status/6295064813
Thanks!
ConnieFoggles´s last blog ..Mom Surgery Tomorrow
December 7th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I wonder why no such thing as “write speed” gets mentioned in Eye-Fi reviews?
I’m curious about the Eye-Fi Pro but I don’t want to risk my Nikon D5000 not being able to save HD video fast enough or I have to wait second(s) for RAW+JPG files to get saved to the card.
I’m using a Sandisk Extreme III With 20mb/s write speed now, but Eye-Fi doesn’t seem to publish write speed on their “Pro” card so I don’t know how well it performs.
Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Dots Gloves D200 Finally Arrived – Quick Review & Video Demo
December 7th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Eye-Fi has been responding to some comments on this blog, so maybe they will respond. I don’t know the write speed to the card itself.
December 8th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I decided to email them and ask. They replied pretty quick, within a day. But the answer made sure I won’t be buying one. If they can’t be bothered to inform potential customers about write speed so users will know if it’s fast enough for their hardware or not, then it must surely NOT be fast enough.
“Thank you for your interest in Eye-Fi, unfortunately Eye-Fi does not release the write speed of our products”
Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Apple Tablet – Could This Be The One?