Ted Rheingold’s Not So Impressed with Eye-Fi
I’ve heard a lot of drooling about the Eye-Fi Card. It’s supposed to be a cool wireless SD card that can upload your photos to the Internet without the use of a laptop. I couldn’t understand why everyone was so excited about it because it looked like a $100 complication, not a simplification. I’m glad to know that my instincts were spot on.
The Eye-Fi has to be configured with each local network you use and you it can only be configured via the Eye-FI USB dongle. Worse the Eye-Fi software can’t play with most hotspots, free and hotel wifi points. So much for photos on-the-go without the laptop which was my primary desire.
The real let-down to me, however, is that the upload from camera to photo sharing site (in my case Flickr) will upload every picture on the card. You cannot limit it to just some. I’m too bad a photographers for that. Also the Eye-Fi currently does not support any of the config settings I use with Flickr, so all titles, descriptions, tags, and groupings have to be done manually at Flickr.com which i find to be time consuming.
It uploads EVERY photo on your card?! That is completely unacceptable to me. There are so many photos that I take trying to get just one good shot. That one good shot goes to Flickr, not the whole collection!
Thanks for the review, Ted. You’ve saved a bunch of people from an expensive mistake.