We all cry for Eye-Fi

If the only pictures you ever take are with your iPhone, iPad, or whatever iteration of smartphone or tablet the cool kids are using these days, you may be able to skip this blog post and get back to that hotly contested game of Angry Birds you've been playing since Memorial day.  If however, you still take pictures with an actual camera (how Paleolithic of you), then you may want to read on. 

Before we move on to the description and review of today's product, let me set the stage a little bit.  I have been a photography nut for over 40 years.  Obviously, I started with a film camera and I loved shooting film.  I loved everything about it.  The smell, the feel, the ritual of opening the box, then the foil pack or plastic cup and pulling the leader out and threading it into the camera.  The slight feeling of dread that maybe you didn't get it hooked in quite right and the film wouldn't advance.  Then of course, you never knew if the picture was going to be any good until it came back from the lab.  Nothing like that feeling of opening the package of prints or the developing canister to see if the pictures or negatives were worth keeping.

I left the film world kicking and screaming, I still have a film camera and 4 or 5 rolls of film.  I resisted going digital for way longer than I should have.  When I finally took the megapixel plunge I fell hard and now I love everything about digital photography.  I think the average person does too, based on the fact that every day over 30 billion pieces of content are uploaded to Facebook.  Of course easily half of those are either cat photos or hand-held smartphone self portraits of teenaged girls.

Now we get to the fun stuff.  If you take actual pictures of actual things with an actual camera you want to do something with the photos.  I mean other than carrying your camera to the family reunion to show Maw-maw 436 pictures of little Henry from the past year on a 2 1/2 inch screen (Maw-maw doesn't see as well as she used to), OK, sorry, I've digressed again.  If you actually want to do something with those photos you have a few choices, none of them are bad.  You can hook up a wire from your computer to your camera, you can pop out the memory card and put it in a card reader on your computer, or you can take the memory card to Wal-Mart and put it in a reader there.  All these options are fine, but when you take as many pictures as I do it can get a little tedious.

Enter the little orange technological  marvel known as the Eye-Fi card.  Plug this little card into the SD card slot in your camera and when you take a picture, it automatically shows up wherever you want it to.  You can decide during set-up.  The photos can go to your lap-top, desktop, website, tablet, the cloud, your Flickr, or Facebook accounts just to name a few.  The Eye-Fi also geotags the photo with exact time date and location of the photograph.

 

I was given a couple of these babies to try a year or so ago and didn't have a lot of luck with them.  They wouldn't connect and the photos wouldn't upload properly if at all, so I sent them back and did things the old fashioned way.  Well recently I got one of the "new and improved" generation 2 cards.  I didn't hold out much hope and didn't rush into trying it. It comes with the card and a little cheap looking plastic USB card reader. See below.

 

   This time things worked.  I plugged it in to my laptop and things went very smoothly.  It connected immediately to my home wireless network and started guiding me through the setup process.  The whole thing took 15 minutes and I was taking test shots in no time.  This thing works really well and the payoff is that if you set it up right, you can take pictures at the reunion and when you get home they are already on your computer waiting to be edited.  Or, if Maw-maw has wireless internet and you have your tablet, you can show her the shots you just took, on a format a little easier for senior eyes to see.

There are a few drawbacks.  It would be great if you could feed directly into Lightroom or some other workflow product and avoid the tether for studio work, but it won't work like that yet.  Also if you set it up to feed directly to Facebook or some other social media site, be aware that every picture you take will be beamed immediately to the page you choose.  On the other hand, your pictures of the reunion will be on Facebook hours before the rest of the cousins even get home.  It can be slow, so don't get into a hurry but it has never failed me in thousands of shots.  The capacity  is small.  I have the 8 GB version and that only holds 250 or so pictures if you shoot in RAW like I do.  If you shoot RAW + JPG then the total will be significantly less.  You can set it up for "endless memory" which means it erases the file after it has been uploaded to make room for new files and you can shoot continuously, but I don't trust that feature yet. 

The cards are not cheap, street price about $60 for the 8 GB and $85 for the 16 GB but they have dropped in price quite a bit recently and should continue to get less expensive.

To sum it up, is this the only SD card I would carry?  No, or course not, but this card is always in the number 1 slot on my camera.  I haven't seen any loss of picture quality.  I love the automatic uploading and geotagging.  Even an inexpensive digital camera paired with a properly set-up Eye-Fi card is sure to be the hit of your next reunion.

keith@keithlewisphoto.com

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