Please tell me you have heard of this genius piece of technology! The Eye-Fi 2GB SD card works in a zillion cameras and lets you wirelessly upload (download? I guess it depends on what you’re doing) your photos straight from you camera to an online service or to your Mac. I have my card set to download directly to iPhoto but you can also choose for it to download to a folder. While they have many different flavors of these little cards most of them are upgradable to take on more services. Earlier this week I saw that they had released a new card for those of us who are “Macs”. It works with all the new fancy geotagging features in iPhoto. Imagine my excitement when I logged into my Eye-Fi account and saw that I could upgrade my card for $15 a year to support this feature. I wasn’t entirely sure how this would work, didn’t even understand how I could just upgrade to this feature on my old card. Here’s what I found out and a little bit about my testing.
Took my ratty old Canon SD400 with Eye-Fi card to my office. Annoyed coworkers by randomly taking their picture. Went to add my office WiFi network to my card but couldn’t as we run WPA Enterprise authentication and the Eye-Fi doesn’t support that. Decided to just insert my Eye-Fi card into my new fancy SD slot on my MacBook Pro. Downloaded my photos to iPhoto but there was no GeoTag data there. Uh Oh. Did I misunderstand what I was getting? Did I need another service? After a little bit of research I found that the technology behind the Eye-Fi card relied on SKYHOOK Wireless. From what I gather the Eye-Fi card can sense these SKYHOOK wireless access points (doesn’t have to connect to them) and records the location data to the pictures. Now here’s the hook, it only translates that data when it does all it’s connecting through the web and wirelessly transfers your pictures to their destination. So me using the SD slot bypassed that translation process which is why I didn’t have any Geo info. When I got to a place that I could connect my MacBook Pro to wireless and add that network to the card I was able to do the pic transfer and voila there was the data showing with great precision where my office is!
Why am I so excited? When they announced the new iPhoto this year and all the GeoTagging fanciness I was hot to get a new camera. I’ve been waiting and waiting for some with a GeoTagging feature to be released. So far there have been very few models with these features, and even fewer that are just little point and shoot cameras. This essentially means I can get any camera I want that takes an SD card and have this feature. Looks like I’m going gadget shopping.
