Eye-Fi - the Wi-Fi SD card for digital camera fans
Eye-Fi sounds like a great idea. It is a Wi-Fi enabled SD card that can transfer images and video from your digital camera to a PC and thence online. But it turns out to be an expensive and fiddly no-wires trick I can live without.
There are various cards available, and they differ in both capacity and features. I was sent the 4GB ‘Share Video’ card which Amazon UK is currently selling it for £71 - is extremely steep for an SD card of that capacity.
Other versions of the card support additional features. Geotagging is supported by the ‘Explore Video’ card (which is not available in the UK), while there is also a Pro card, sold in a 4GB version by Amazon for an extremely hefty £121. You can see a comparison chart of all the cards’ features at the Eye-Fi Web site and see what is sold in the UK at the UK version of the site here.
The kit comprises the SD card itself and a USB card reader which acts as the bridge to setting up the Eye-Fi Manager software and allows older computers to cope with the SDHC format of the higher capacity cards.
Software installation was not too much of a hassle, and you set up access to online sharing centres as part of the process. If you are within range of the Wi-Fi network photos are uploaded as soon as you shoot them, though I found the upload process took a bit longer than a more old fashioned manual cut or copy task.
You can’t set a local folder destination during the initial setup which means you have to manually move the first few photos to your preferred destination and make a manual settings change in the Eye-Fi Manager software, both of which are minor irritations but ones that could easily be fixed.
There are some jobs the Eye-Fi can’t help with. Photos still need to be deleted from the SD card manually and you’ve got to do the naming and sub-folder organising manually too, of course.
Another niggle is while you can change the file size at which photos are uploaded this has to be done through an advanced options window which is not immediately apparent. I missed it first time round. Very annoyingly I found that some images uploaded twice, so I needed to do some manual deleting.
Your digital camera has to be on for transfer to take place – you may well need to change a setting, and then you’ll need to remember to turn the camera off after uploads are finished. There are obvious battery life issues here.
On the plus side the whole thing does work. But the fiddles and annoyances, when added to the overall price, make the Eye-Fi a difficult thing to recommend. I do like the idea, though, and look forward to seeing how it develops.