I caught an article on Yahoo! yesterday talking about a new innovation in technology. The Eye-Fi memory card is an amazing new gadget that enables you to connect your digital camera to your computer without any wires and without removing your card from your camera. What’s more, the Eye-Fi card will even allow you to automatically upload your pictures from your camera to your favorite social networking or photo gallery Web site.
Some commenters on the Yahoo! blog are saying that this is old news, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
It will be interesting to see if this concept catches on, and to see how much they will expand on the concept. Currently, the card is only available in the 2-gig SD card format. In addition, it only allows you to upload JPEG-format images. Finally, because of the way a lot of “wifi hotspots” are configured, there’s no way to use the card in those areas. You have to be able to connect to an unsecured or password-protected wireless connection.
Imagine if they expand the technology to allow you to automatically upload videos from your camera to YouTube. Imagine if they figure out how to allow you login to wifi hotspots with the card. Take some pictures at the park or something, run to the nearest Starbucks or Panera and upload your pictures straight to a new Picasa Web album.
The possibilities are truly endless if the technology continues to expand.
Currently, the card supports automatic uploading to the following sites/services:
- dotphoto
- flickr
- fotki
- Gallery (the PHP photo gallery software)
- Kodak Gallery
- phanfare
- photobucket
- Picasa
- Sharpcast
- shutterfly
- SmugMug
- snapfish
- TypePad
- VOX
- Wal-Mart Digital Photo Center
- webshots
As you can see from that very impressive list of services, you could really do just about anything with your pictures if you have an Eye-Fi memory card inside your camera. You can send them to Wal-Mart to get them developed, you can send them straight to your own Web site (via a software application like Gallery) to be automatically added into the content of your site. You can share them with your friends and with the world (with services like Flickr, Picasa, etc.).
Is anyone out there using one of these, yet? My camera is a Sony Cybershot (meaning that it uses Sony’s proprietary memory format – the Memory Stick), so I can’t grab one of these, yet. I am very curious about them, though.
If you are curious, you can check out the official Web site of Eye-Fi at http://www.eye.fi/share/.
One Response
it’s very cool – and such a smart idea!