Eye-fi fanboyism

I just got a new eye-fi card and I’ve been trying to detangle how it should work. It’s complicated so I’m posting this so other people can learn from my mistakes. And it makes standing in front of my neighbors house in the middle of the night taking pictures seem less weird.

But first thing: If your camera uses SD cards for the love of god go buy an eye-fi. It’s $40 and you’ll never have to worry about getting pictures uploaded again. Our old camera (and our old eye-fi card) were stolen and everybody I tell says something along the lines of:

“The worst part is you lose all your memories” but I don’t! My memories download to my computer as soon as I walk in the door. And by the time I get upstairs I’m looking at them on flickr. The work I had to do for that? Turn on my camera.

And that was the old cards. The new cards, are frankly ridiculous. My new eye-fi card, if it decides it can’t find a network it knows about to connect and get my pictures out, will create it’s own adhoc network and wait for somebody to connect to it. There are official iOS and Android apps to do this. How this works, and how you set it up isn’t obvious. So I grabbed my camera and my phone and walked up the block until my wi-fi wasn’t in range (I could have just turned it off, but the story explaining why I didn’t is long and boring enough you’re better off just trusting that it was easier to get up and walk 50 yards).

Then I pulled out my camera and took a picture. Then I pulled out my phone, made sure it had wi-fi on, and opened the eye-fi app. A bit later the photo was on my phone. Magic.

Do I really want my camera battery to be running a wi-fi hotspot all the time? No, but the card doesn’t quite do that. If the eye-fi card sees that it has pictures to send it looks for a wifi network to send them on. If it can’t find one it waits N minutes (where N is configurable in the eye-fi tools) then starts up it’s hotspot. It will then wait for a connection for Y minutes then give up. That’s not too terrible, but since I really want this for vacations so I can dump my pictures onto my phone/ipad and get back to filling up my card I’m going to leave it off.

Irritatingly enough though you can’t turn direct mode on and off unless the card is plugged into your computer via USB. So it’s not something you can decide on a whim to do. On the balance I decided to leave it off unless I’m going somewhere I think it might be nice.

Another nice feature of the card is that endless memory: You can configure the card to clean itself up. I have it set to clean up pictures (that have been transferred to the computer) once it’s 50% full (That’s configurable. 50% is the default which seemed reasonable to me). With the old card I’d have to occasionally go in and clear the card out, which usually happen somewhere I was taking lots of pictures, so I had to do it manually to free up space right then and there. But now the card will take care of it for me.

Meanwhile the eye-fi app on iPhone will also push all of your phone camera pictures home too. I tested it out a little and it looks like you have to open the app and send them on, and it will only send pictures that were actually taken by the camera (instagram pic saved to camera roll didn’t transfer). So occasionaly I fire up the eye-fi app and all my pictures get sent to my computer and flickr. One less reason to ever have to sync my computer. I’m going to set that up on Kim’s phone because she’s terrible about synching her phone: The other day we finally synched it and there were almost 400 pictures to get transferred.

I’m very excited about this, all my pictures can just show up on flickr where I want them, and I don’t have to do hardly anything. And I don’t have to worry nearly so much about running out of space on memory cards. Worst case I can dump it onto my phone, regardless of local network conditions.

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