3 posts tagged “eye-fi”
I came home around 7pm looking forward to getting the new Eye-Fi Explore that has Wi-Fi geotagging and wayport HotSpot access. As usual the cardboard box was put in front of the door and the box was crunched like this photo. And it was so light.
I was upset like "Oh shit someone unboxed this and stole the item. WTF" but the actualy the Eye-Fi card along with the recipt was inside, not stolen at all. I was now relieved but I feel a bit concerned who the hell did this. My apartment building is secured with the key fob thing and an access to the individual floor requires a key code in the elevator. So it should be someone in this apartment building or someone who tailgated. Bleh.
My room is just in front of the elevator and I've been ordering lots of things from Amazon which are usually shipped by UPS and they're always put in front-door. But this is the first time I've got this. UPS always comes around 6PM so maybe next time I'll try to be at home or put a note saying "Dear UPS: Call my cell or don't leave the item here" if the item is expensive. Hmm.
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!
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.
