Eye-Fi Review

Overview
The Eye-Fi is a new gadget that just came out for the 2007 Christmas buying spree. It looks and acts just like a 2GB SD memory card for your camera, but it has a secret hidden compartment with a magic teleporter that sends your photos through the ether to your computer and/or your favorite online photo sharing site (Flickr, Smugmug, Costco, etc).


The Details
To the camera, this looks like any other memory card. You can take as many pictures of your cats or your flower garden as you like and it'll be stored just like with any other card. But there's more to it. It's also a wifi card that will connect automatically to your home wifi network when you're in range and start sending your images over to a little server listening on your computer. You can also optionally set up an account with Eye-Fi's service where you give your Flickr (or other photo site) username and password and the photos will additionally be uploaded to your Flickr account by way of the Eye-Fi service. If you're not within range of your home wifi network, the card will store your images until it detects it's within range and then it'll start the transfer.

Setup was a snap, even for the less technically inclined. It has a little USB dongle thing with all the necessary software and drivers on there. You plug that into your computer once and that's that.

The Good
No more wires, no more manual uploading. When the image starts to transfer, a little thumbnail of the image pops up in the lower left corner of your computer. A progress meter tells you how the transfer is going.

The Bad
I'm not such a big fan of the idea of my embarrasing underwear photos flying around through the intertubes through a third party service that may or may not be around in a few months. There are ways around this, of course, like not using the photo site feature and/or setting the default to "Private". But still.

The good news is that if you're just using it on your local network, the photos never leave your network (I think). That is, I turned off my internet connection and took some pictures and they still showed up on the computer. Whether a not a secret copy of me in my underoos is sitting on the Eye-Fi servers has yet to be determined.

A minor thing is that if you turn on both the computer upload and photo site upload, you'll have to sift through 3 copies of your photos (don't forget that they're sitting on the memory card too) when it comes time to delete or organize.

If your camera only has Compact Flash, you may or may not be able to get a converter. I haven't tested this out, but there are some available for about $20.

The Alternatives
None that I know of.

The Verdict
If you hate manually uploading your photos, this is for you. You can pick one up for about 100 wingwangs on Amazon. Check out the Eye-Fi website.