I've been away from this blog for a while. It has not been for a lack of things to blog about, but a shortage of time. I am here at home on a Sunday evening with a few minutes to spare and I thought I'd attempt to post a short article.
This past summer I purchased the Eye-Fi Explore SD card for our Canon digital camera and it is a great add-on and time saver. It looks like an ordinary SD memory card, but it is anything but ordinary. The people at Eye-fi were able to squeeze in a Wifi transmitter into the memory card that is able to automatically geotag your images based on your location (as long as there is a wifi access point nearby) and upload your images to your computer and to your favorite online photo sharing web site, such as, Flickr or Picasa. Refer to the diagram below:
The device costs $129, however you can spend less for models with fewer features and upgrade at a later time. We have used the camera on overseas trips and events on campus. It has preformed as advertised. Photos were uploaded to iPhoto on my MacBook and uploaded to Flickr wirelessly. I get email notifications whenver uploads start and end. Afterward, I can go into Flick and approve the images and make them public for the world to see. If I was confident that all of the pictures were great I could have them viewable by the public by default, but I like to be able to preview them first.
The only problem I've had with the card is that I can no longer initialize or browse the card via Finder on my MacBook, but I can if I use Windows XP in Parallels on my MacBook. Therefore, I know it is not my hardwe, but something to do with the softwareon the Mac. It did work when I first got it, but it stopped working after an update to either the Eye-Fi or to the MacBook.
If you take a lot of photos that you want to share with others quickly and easily, the Eye-Fi is the way to go. There are a few new cameras that offer wireless transferrs and geotagging, but most do not. The Eye-fi is a great way to add those capabilities to an exisiting camera, just make sure it supports the SD memory card, I cannot use the card in our Sony cameras which use the Memory Stick format.