Disclaimer: 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.

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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:

1. You get 1 entry for each comment you leave on this blog post about the Eye-Fi.
2. 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.

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Update:

The contest is now closed, IZEA will be picking winners. Stay tuned for announcement.

-Dragon Blogger

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