Eye-Fi for the iPhone

bike ride picture taken with iPhone

Today, as most Saturdays are, was family day. We went for a bike ride to the park, and a picnic. I pulled Lily in the Burley, and Annie pulled Kate on a trail-a-bike. The only camera I had with me was my iPhone, so I decided to snap a few pictures. Now, how to get these pictures somewhere that someone else can see them. Email? I don’t like doing one at a time, and entering email addresses is a pain.

How about to a web site? My website. Well, if you have an eye-fi card for your camera, you can use their service with the iPhone. What the eye-fi service normally does is sends pictures from your camera through a special wi-fi memory card through your router to their site. From there they can send it back to your computer, or a web site, or both. I have a site using Gallery2 software that they support.

eye-fi-iphoneThe iPhone app works similar, but you don’t need a wireless card, you already have on in the iPhone. So, the images get sent to eye-fi’s servers, then on to my gallery. Here is the one from today

I think this is pretty cool. The interface is simple. The app displays pictures from your iPhone, and you pick the ones you want to send. You can even see other images that you sent to the service (history). The image you see here is how you select what images to upload.

Over 3G you don’t have the fastest speeds, and if your phone goes to sleep, then the transfer is interrupted, but it does a good job of resuming afterward.

I like that I don’t have to sync the phone, export from iPhoto, and then ftp the images. This is so much easier, and so much more immediate for my family scattered across the continent. The app is simple, and it works. If you have an eye-fi card for a camera, you should definitely try this app.

Eye-Fi is pretty neat.

So I have had a few minutes to play with my Eye-Fi card now. First off, it is now working. It does appear that they sold a bazilion of these for Christmas and the servers couldn’t handle it. (According to their site) They have aparently recoved, and I was able to get registered. So far I have hooked it up to Gallery2 running on annieandchris.net to recieve the pictures. Pretty cool. I could just snap a picture of the kids, and blamo, it would appear on the website.

A couple of things so far. I have no geotagging data in EXIF. Not sure if that it becuase of my router doesn’t work with their “skynet” or whatever they are doing, or something else. Also, you can’t tell in camera if the picture has been sent or not. I saw in their control panel that you could select to get a SMS or email or something if pictures have been uploaded, so that might work just as well. It would be nice to know when it is safe to delete the images. When the images hit my Gallery2, they get placed in a new folder named with the date. I think I want all Eye-Fi pics to get placed into the same folder. I might have to try hacking the remote script.

Merry Eye-Fi Christmas

Merry Christmas to anyone that wants to be wished a Merry Christmas. This morning I opened a present to find an Eye-Fi explore card.Sweet. These things look pretty cool. I wish I could tell you how cool it is to wirelessly transfer images to my computer, but alas, it is not working.

The 2gig card comes with a reader and the software on the card. That is pretty smart. No disk required. I installed the software on my Mac laptop, and tried to go to the Eye-Fi manager app, which directs you to their website login. Problem is, I haven’t registered yet. I searched everywhere on their site, but can’t figure out how to register. It is supposed to send me their automaticly, where I would register and be good to go. Unfortunatly that is not how it is working.

I tired another mac as well, but the same thing happened. I looked on their forum, and found a thread that was suggesting that I may have to send the card back because it may have been registered to someone else already. That would be silly if they have no way to reset their cards or their online database. Hopefully once customer service is at their stations again, someone there can get this straightened out.