Eye-Fi Cards - Transfer Photos without Cables
When there’s no space left in the memory card of your digital camera, you normally have to hunt for a USB cable to transfer all your pictures and videos from the camera on to your computer’s hard drive.
With Eye-Fi, the process gets a little easier as this affordable cards can turn your digital camera into a wireless device.
Eye-Fi is just like a regular memory card but with a built-in Wi-Fi chip so you can wirelessly transfer photographs and videos from a digital camera to your computer over an existing wireless home network* without requiring USB cables. Here’s a video of an Eye-Fi memory card in action.
Other than transferring media from the camera to the computer, you may also use an Eye-Fi card to post pictures /videos on Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, Facebook and host of other social sites even when your computer is off.
Now if you think it makes sense to buy an Eye-Fi card this holiday season as a gift or for your own self, here’s a sweet deal for people in US and Canada. If you buy a 200 GB account for your Gmail and Picasa Web Albums, Google will send you a 4 GB Eye-Fi Home video card for free (update: offer has expired).
The regular online price of the Eye-Fi 4GB card is around $70 but if you buy the same 4GB SD card though Google, you need to pay only $50 - that’s a saving of $20 and you also get 200 GB** of storage space for your photos and videos on Picasa Web Albums.
PS:If you don’t have a wireless router at home, you can still use Eye-Fi to transfer photos wirelessly by setting up an ad-hoc wireless network on your Windows or Mac OS X machines but the 4GB card that is part of the Google offer doesn’t support ad-hoc networking.
[**] Google will charge you an annual fee of $50 for maintaining your 200GB Picasa account but you can always downgrade or even cancel your account later and still keep the Eye-Fi wireless card forever.
Related: Online Backup for your Photos [Comparison of services]
Amit Agarwal
Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion
Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.
Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory