Friday, September 3, 2010


Eye-Fi Changes How You Deal with Digital Pictures

Articles Written by: Mike Temporale on Monday, January 19, 2009 8:30am

Eye-Fi-CardsOne of the first companies I saw at CES was Eye-Fi.  They dropped by CntrStg early on Thursday and showed off their products. Ziv Gillat, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, showed off the latest in Eye-Fi goodness. I had never heard of Eye-Fi prior to CES this year, but now that I have seen this product in action, you can bet that I’ll be buying one shortly!  So what is so great about these Eye-Fi guys? Easy, they take your standard SD card and add in wireless plus a little smarts. So now when you take a picture, it will automatically upload your pictures over your wireless router to your home computer or to your flickr account. That means you will never have to take the card out of your camera, insert it into your computer, and manually copy pictures off it again and that’s hands down cool.

Ziv told us about their latest announcement – video support.  With the latest card, you can automatically upload videos you take from your camera right to YouTube! Or, if you really feel the need, you can put a copy on your computer as well. ;)

The Eye-Fi cards support all of the popular online photo sharing sites, including SmugMug and Flickr. Certain cards also support Geo-Tagging of your photos through the use of SkyHook. The idea behind SkyHook is actually pretty slick. It uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi Positioning to get a fast, accurate and dependable location information for your pictures. And unlike GPS, it works great indoors.

Eye-Fi has been in operation for approximentaly 2 years, and have had product available for about 1 year. In that year, they have seen over 5 million pictures uploaded to online photo sharing sites via their Eye-Fi cards.  That number does not include the pictures people have had sent to their computers.

I’m going to be adding one to my gadget bag shortly.  I’m just trying to decide if I should wait for my local store to carry the Geo-Tagging card, or just grab the regular version and do without the location goodies. I highly recommend this card to anyone that snaps pictures on a regular basis.  You won’t be disappointed. :)

Comments (9)
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Comments

9 Responses to “Eye-Fi Changes How You Deal with Digital Pictures”

  1. ziv on January 19th, 2009 3:48 pm

    Any of our cards can be upgraded with services, and geo is one of those services. So, you can buy the Share card, for example, and add geo or roaming to it (or both) for $14.99 (each). So you can just buy whichever card you want, and mix and match services ;-)

    http://www.eye.fi/services/

  2. ziv on January 19th, 2009 3:48 pm

    Forgot to mention — AWESOME write-up :-)

  3. Mike Temporale on January 19th, 2009 9:21 pm
    Mike Temporale

    Oh! Now that changes things a little. I didn’t realize that I could mix and match the services. Very cool – I’ll be out to pick up one of these cards this week!

  4. ziv on January 19th, 2009 9:50 pm

    Cool. Shop around online (I love froogle). You can pick one up for $49 (Home) or $59 (Share) or $79 (Explore)…

    :-)

  5. Peter Temporale on January 20th, 2009 4:12 pm
    Peter Temporale

    I have to ask,… i hope there’s a way to prevent it from uploading pictures or videos automatically? Otherwise, you might end up uploading a bunch of useless pictures. I’m thinking about all the pics you take with a digital camera – only a small percentage are good and worth uploading.

  6. Mike Temporale on January 21st, 2009 9:05 am
    Mike Temporale

    @Peter – It does upload automatically, but you can always delete it from the camera first, or from your computer/flickr after it’s uploaded. Or, you can have it set to upload to your computer where you can then look more closely at the image and then decide if you want to keep it or not. I always off load images to my computer and then go through and decide which I want to keep. :)

  7. Peter Temporale on January 21st, 2009 4:23 pm
    Peter Temporale

    It does upload automatically?! Interesting.

  8. ziv on January 21st, 2009 4:51 pm

    Yes, if you’re in-range of wi-fi, every photo (and in the near future, movie) will upload to either your computer, the web (25+ sites), or both. If you’re out of range, and then you come back into range, and turn on the camera, the uploads will resume. So if you want to erase the “bad” photos before they upload, do that in the camera while you’re out of range, or quickly, while you’re in range.

    The easier thing to do is to upload into a private album, go online, erase the bad photos, and then share the album.

    You can also turn sharing on/off through the Eye-Fi Manager, ahead of time. So if you know in advance that you don’t want to share, log in to the Manager, and turn sharing off. Then, go, shoot, and even when you come back into range of a known wi-fi, nothing will upload to the web (or to your computer).

    The bottom line is — it’s totally up to you. Uploading everything makes things easy and fully automatic so that you won’t need to do anything other than just having fun with the camera

  9. clintonfitchdotcom on January 22nd, 2009 9:31 pm
    Clinton Fitch

    I really like the idea of Eye-Fi. It bridges that gap of taking the shot and taking the time to upload them. This is where I think most users – me included – fall down on the sharing of photos with friends and family. Great concept and the wide range of supported sites is awesome to see.

    Good job – look forward to seeing more!

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