Eye-Fi feature requests
1 week of playing with Eye-Fi card. So far, so great. It totally reduces the pain of uploading photos to Flickr and also to my computer. So here are few requests if someone from Eye-fi read this :)
1. Hardware switch to disable Wi-Fi completely
The Eye-fi wireless locator tries to find the wireless even if I'm out of places that I registeres SSID hotspots with, and that consumes a lot of battery. Also, I think technically I can't use any digital camera with this SD card inserted on any airplane. I know this needs a hardware upgrade so if you release Eye-Fi next generation, it'd be great if you keep this in consideration.
2. Open API to subscribe to photo uploads events
When I take photos in wireless areas but my laptop is turned off, I don't know if/when the photo uploads are done. I know the Eye-Fi manager site was built by SitePen using Dojo and probably cometd, so there should be a Comet based PubSub API to receive events programatically. I'm ready to reverse engineer the dojo code or packet dump the Eye-Fi agent's transport, but opening the API so we can make our own event poller would be nice. That way we can write a custom app that runs on Windows/OSX to do things like "update my twitter when photos are uploaded from Eye-Fi" or "send me SMS so I know I can turn the camera off".
3. Automatic geotagging using WiFi accesspoint to geo database
I just thought it'd be nice if Eye-Fi can automatically add geo EXIF data to the photo (and probably add geo machine tags when uploading to photo site like Flickr) by looking up WiFi accesspoint to location database like PlaceEngine, Navizon or Windows Live Maps or even ip address to geo like hostip. There might be privacy issues with this and it probably should be turned off by default, but I'd love that feature!
Comments
Now we have a Compact Flash card with GPS capability built-in: http://blog.epicedits.com/2007/11/26/automatic-geotagging-with-gps-compact-flash-card/
We want Wi-Fi+GPS. Both. :)
For the next generation, some kind of indicator on the end of the card would be a real bonus. I'm thinking an indication that the card is connected to eye-fi servers, and a second for a transfer in progress. Maybe another to indicate wifi availability. I'd gladly sacrifice most of the memory for that ability.
It would be nice if the USB adaptor, rather than a generic SD reader, had a simple interface, to perform basic configuration tasks and report status.
A switch on the card to disable the wifi component temporarily would also be nice.