Eye-Fi card
So I got this tiny magic SD card Eye-Fi from Amazon. It's $99 with 2G storage and not a bad deal itself, but more than that, it has a wireless support.
The way it works is this: It ships with the SD card and a tiny USB stick. For the initial setup, you insert the SD card to the USB stick and connect to your PC/Mac's USB. It'll automatically install the "Eye-Fi manager" software and guides you to the management site manager.eye.fi.
With the site you can configure your username/password things to the photo sharing sites like Flickr, Facbook and of course our own Vox and TypePad (I'm proud Six Apart is the only company that has 2 services in the list!)
Also you can configure the Wi-Fi setup of the SD card and the document folder you'd like to syncronize your photos to, in your computer.
Now the setup is done, and you don't need the USB stick anymore unless you re-configure your SD card to add an extra Wireless network etc.
You can just take as many photos as you'd like and as you take, the photos are uploaded to your favorite photo sharing site automatically. Actually, as far as I can tell, the photo is first uploaded to manager.eye.fi site with its authentication and from there their application sends the photos to the external photo sharing site. This makes it easy for them to add other photo sharing site without updating SD card firmware etc. Clever.
For sites like Flickr and Vox, you can configure the privcacy setting (You only, Friends, Family, Public) and also auto-add the tag 'Eye-Fi', which is so cool. The manager site (manager.eye.fi) is built by SitePen using Dojo and comet, so it's great as soon as your camera starts uploading something, you'll see the upload status realtime on manager dashboard. Pretty well done!
Also if you enable the option to synchronize the photos to your computer, if your camera and the computer is on the same network, the photos are sent to the computer wirelessly. (UPDATE: I tested this on my office network, having my camera on free-wifi and my laptop on secured wi-fi, and it was actually syncronized. So I guess the Eye-fi manager software running on PC is downloading photos from the manager site)
So even if you don't need/want an automatic uploads to the photo sharing site, the Eye-Fi card is still useful because you don't need to pull out and connect the card to the laptop, or use the bulky USB cable to syncronize photos. It looks like it only allows you to copy the files to the same folder (unlike the folder name with dates etc... UPDATE: it actually has an option to auto-add photo creation date (or upload date) as a sub folder. Cool) but I guess it actually plays well if you enable "Folder Action" on Mac or equivalent on windows, like "if jpeg files are added to this folder, resize it and send them to Flickr" kind of thing.
Yes, there are some problems: if you don't have a computer but your camera is on Wireless, there's no way for you to know when the uploads are complete (It's not a big issue since whenever you turn on your camera it'll auto-resume the upload it seems like). You can't select which photos to upload: all photos are just uploaded without any prompts. Also, it consumes a lot of battery.
But overall this is a good buy for $99. Available on Amazon.
Comments
Thank you for your very kind offer.
But let me think for a while about the battery life thing. :-)
Only thing that I was a little hesitant about is that it's going to go into a eye-fi directory on my computer and I'll have to do something special to add them to my iPhoto directory with all my other photos. But still it might be worth it, and to have the added bonus of being able to send to Vox if I wanted to also? super duper.... :)