Mark Collier

I’ve been buying and trying various forms of technology since I was knee high, and I can’t remember a product that’s more useful day in and day out for less than a hundred bucks than the Eye-fi.

This magical device looks like a memory card for your camera (it is) but what it also does is automatically upload all of your photos from your camera directly to the site of your choice (I use flickr – works brilliantly).

Old Process – so laborious we’d only do it one every 2 or 3 months:

1)  Find the damn USB cable

2)  Connect camera to the PC

3)  Transfer the files to the PC

4)  Organize photos on the PC

5)  Upload to Flickr (used to use Ofoto but their upload app would always hang=more frustration, so we switched)

6)  Send an email to friends and family

Now, instead of this 6 step process, this is how we get photos from the camera to flickr and to our friends and family’s inbox:

0)  there are no steps.

Seriously, there ARE NO STEPS.  If the camera is on and near your wifi router at home, it uploads the pics.  If the camera is off, it will upload them the next time it’s turned on.  Anyone who is a flickr contact that has notifications turned on, will get an email when new pics show up (I recommend you set it to once a day max, since we’ll be spamming you with lots of pic emails via the frequent Eye-fi uploads).

From time to time I’ll use Flickr’s excellent “organize” function to group photos into sets.  This usually takes less than a minute, and is always done after the fact when time allows, so it never gets in the way of timely photo sharing. Sure, you get a few bloopers on there but grand parents will be thrilled with the daily peak into the lives of their grand kids. You’ll start taking a lot more photos, too, once you see all of the great feedback from loved ones.

The only cons for this product are the slow write speed of the memory card (camera sometimes pauses to write a photo before I can take the next) and the fact that it doesn’t support video clip uploads to flickr (I bet they will add this to a future firmware update, since flickr only recently added video support).

So, buy this bad boy.  You won’t regret it!

They also recently introduced the “Explore” model for $129 that includes geo-tagging (this tags your photos with the location where they were taken).