Memory card adds wi-fi to your camera

July 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Digital cameras continue to be one of the hottest-selling consumer electronic items. It’s no wonder that more and more accessories for them continue to be developed. Digital picture frames are a hot ticket item as well.

After all, they’re a great way to display the images we take. Another way digital shutterbugs can show off their images is on the web. There are dozens of website services that let you share your images online such as Flickr, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Facebook, just to name a few.

Digital cameras have eliminated the tedium of film cameras. No longer do we have to remove used film cartridges, wind in new ones and ship them off to be developed. Yet there is still one bit of digital tedium that remains; the offloading of images from the camera to the computer.

When you are ready to offload the pictures you’ve taken, you first have to physically attach the camera to your computer via the supplied USB cable.

Then, unless the camera is set up to look like an attached hard drive so you can drag and drop the images from one location to another, you usually have to run some kind of application that lets you dump all of them to the computer or select the images you want to offload.

After that, you can once again feel creative by grouping the ones you want, adding titles, captions and generally having fun with all of them.

So let’s take a closer look at that boring offloading process for a moment. What if you didn’t have to do that anymore? What if you could just point, shoot and your images would automatically be downloaded to your computer without any wires?

Even better, what if you could just download them directly to the web, directly to any of those picture websites I mentioned? Or best of all, what if you could do both at the same time? Well, now you can.

With Eye-Fi, you just snap the pictures and automatically have them delivered to both your computer and the website without any wires.

The Eye-Fi is a 4- or 8-gigabyte SD-type memory card that replaces your camera’s existing memory card. But what makes this memory card stand out in the crowd is that it also has 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi built in. But it’s more than just built-in Wi-Fi that makes the whole thing work.

The Eye-Fi is a well-thought-out system that takes you through the easy setup. Included with the little SD card is a USB memory-card reader.

This is used as part of the setup procedure. To begin, you first insert the Eye-Fi SD card into the reader and plug that into your computer’s USB port. From there, the built-in application lets you set up the Eye-Fi to detect and access your wireless network, configure password entry for security, and select where and how you want the Eye-Fi to deliver your images. The Eye-Fi is pretty flexible with its options and will let you access most Wi-Fi networks, even the ones that require you to log in via an initial Web browser splash screen.

Once you have your Eye-Fi setup and registered with the Eye-Fi service, you remove the card from the reader, insert it into your digital camera and you’re ready to go.

Now all you have to do is take pictures. If you are within your Wi-Fi network’s range, your pictures will be instantly uploaded to your computer, your website or both depending on how you configured it.

Images will be sent as complete JPEG files to your computer, but depending on the Web service you select, images may be scaled automatically to fit the required format constraints.

The Eye-Fi works only with cameras that use the SD-format memory cards, and is compatible with both Windows and Macintosh computers. Some of the newer camera models are set up to automatically detect the Eye-Fi card. These cameras sport additional controls and indicators that feature automatic power-saving and shut-down.

For a list of all compatible cameras and services, it’s best to visit the Eye-Fi website. There are four versions from which to choose, including the Connect X2 ($49.99), Geo X2 ($69.99), Explore X2 ($99.99) and Pro X2 ($149.99).

For more information, visit www.eye.fi.

Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. For more information, visit his website at www.computeramerica.com.

2010 McClatchy Tribune