Digital Photography Tips and Techniques

Available Eye-Fi products

Eye-Fi Inc., makers of the world’s first wireless memory card for digital cameras, recently announced enhancements to its family of Eye-Fi cards that will make the upload of digital photos from camera to computer twice as fast. The faster wireless speeds, enabled via a firmware upgrade, will also be made available to existing Eye-Fi users at no extra cost. In addition, users will be able to upgrade their Eye-Fi cards to add the individual services they want, including Web sharing, geotagging and hotspot access, for a annual fee.

• Web Sharing – Users who have an Eye-Fi Home card can add Eye-Fi’s popular Web sharing service to send photos directly from their camera to one of more than 20 online photo sharing, printing, social networking or blogging sites using a wireless network, saving the time and hassle of manually uploading from the computer. Annual service fee: $9.99.
• Geotagging – Users who have an Eye-Fi Home or Share card can add geotagging to their card. Geotagging invisibly adds geographic information indicating where the photo was taken, allowing users to map where their memories were captured. Annual service fee: $14.99.
• Hotspot Access – Users who have an Eye-Fi Share card can upgrade their card to automatically upload photos away from home at more than 10,000 Wayport hotspots and through open hotspots. Annual service fee: $14.99.

If you will be using the service for a while, you can pay $20 extra up front to get the unlimited web sharing from the Eye-Fi Share card. A $50 extra gives you the Eye-Fi Explore card that offers unlimited web sharing and geotagging. There is no unlimited hotspot access, but it doesn’t matter if you only needs to access your home network or open hotspots.

In a separate news, Nikon D90 becomes the second Eye-Fi Connected DSLR, after the Nikon D60. The camera will detect when an Eye-Fi card is inserted and manage its power settings to ensure that photos upload effortlessly for sharing and storing. In addition, the Nikon D90 will include an Eye-Fi menu that allows users to turn the wireless function on or off, giving the user more freedom to customize how and when they want to use the Eye-Fi card.

Just FYI, the geotagging capability on the Eye-Fi card, is not based on GPS technology. Instead, it uses known locations of millions of wireless Wi-Fi access points to tag the location of the photo. Obvious, it won’t work where no Wi-Fi signal exists. To find our more, please check this Eye-Fi page.