A Review to Make Sense of the Eye-Fi

The Eye-Fi wireless SD card is one of a kind. You either love it or hate it.

Most negative reviews you find out there will say it doesn't work, but in actual fact, I have a feeling that it does work, but it's just not easy to figure it out.

I consider myself a pretty techie guy, but it took me TWO THREE days to really figure it out.



As a disclaimer, I am from Malaysia, and I got these Eye-Fi's from the US. It's not easy to get them here, since wireless devices require import approvals from our regulating bodies, SIRIM as well as custom taxes, etc. required for them.

I got the Eye-Fi 2x Connect card, which has a 4GB memory in it. My primary purpose of buying the card was to immediately upload photos from my Pentax k-5 DSLR to Facebook, without requiring to firstly download to my Macbook. It's just cool to upload quality photos with your ultra wide lens or that nice natural bokeh photos, which is impossible to shoot with your iPhone!

Unboxing
The Eye-Fi comes with 3 things inside the box...
1. The Eye-Fi card
2. A USB SDHC memory card reader
3. Instructions

The Eye-Fi card is made in Thailand, and looks and weights exactly the same as my other SD cards.

A little important note about the Eye-Fi USB card reader that comes with the Eye-Fi: it's 100% a plain ordinary USB China made card reader. There is nothing special about it except that it's orange AND it breaks very easily. My unit stopped working after the second use. Since the card reader is just a cheap card reader, I didn't care much about it and I now use my own card reader to plug my Eye-Fi. 

You can throw the instructions away and follow mine if you find yourself getting stuck. Which I think you will.

Starting Your Eye-Fi Experience

Basically, to get started, just plug the memory card reader with the Eye-Fi inserted (it comes inserted by default) to your USB port.

Then install the software which is found in the memory card (go to File Explorer or Finder and you'll see it as a memory card device). The installer will download the latest version of Eye-Fi Center.

Once Eye-Fi Center is installed, run it and you will be asked to login. If you don't have one, click on the register link and it will open a URL. Simply create user ID (it's free). Note: Eye-Fi when I did this asked for a survey, which I thought was done pre-maturely because that was just the start of my experience with the service and the hard parts are yet to come!

And next comes the mostly confusing process of getting the Eye-Fi running.

Here, I would like to give you the Three (unwritten) Rules of Eye-Fi which Eye-Fi do not tell you up front before we move on.

1. You can only use ONE device at a time to upload photos from the Eye-Fi to. Even though I have four devices with Eye-Fi app (one in my HP laptop, Macbook, Yes Eclipse Android smartphone and iPhone 4), only ONE can be active at any one time. 
2. There are TWO ways of sending your files from Eye-Fi to your device. The first is via the Internet (via Private Network). The second is a direct connection between the Eye-Fi to your device (via Direct Mode). 
3. There are THREE services which does not come free. The first is Eye-Fi View for unlimited time storage (will be explained later). The second is Geo-tagging. The third is using Eye-Fi on WiFi Hotspots (which is only available in the US).

Now that we have establish that, let's move on.

The next part of the installation process will ask you to whether you would like to use the desktop computer you are using OR a mobile device (i.e. Android or iOS). The reason? See the First Rule. Don't worry about your choice, you can always change it later.

Then you are supposed to setup the Eye-Fi network which is the most important and complicated of them all. Here is where Rule Two comes in. You can either setup your Eye-Fi to receive photos in two ways, Private Network or Direct Mode.

Private Network De-Mystified!

When you setup your Private Network for the Eye-Fi, essentially what you are telling your Eye-Fi to do is to hook up with that network every time it detects it's WiFi signal. For e.g., you can setup your Eye-Fi with your home DSL (Streamyx or UniFi in most Malaysian home's) WiFi.

Here's something which took me awhile to understand. In Private Network mode, ALL your photos will be sent from your Eye-Fi via the WiFi network to the Eye-Fi server BEFORE it is sent to your computer.

The good thing about this mode, is that the Eye-Fi server will be able to store all your photos in the cloud, using the Eye-Fi View service (more of that later) AND automatically upload photos to Facebook for you without any additional work. It's a super easy way of automatically keeping your photos in your computer, the internet and your social network.

So what, you may ask, is the bad thing about that? Well, consider this... if you have taken a hundred high-resolution photos, each photos is 10MB in size. That is 1GB of files you will be uploading from your card to the internet AND that will then be downloaded from the internet to your computer. You will have essentially use up 2GB of internet bandwidth which would cost you money (most internet providers have a monthly cap for usage) AND time (it takes 80secs to upload a 10MB file over a 1MBPS upstream line, total of 2hours+ just to complete uploading! And you need to then download that same data to your computer!). Not a very good idea, especially if you can use a USB SD card reader for free and which will complete transfer in minutes, not hours.

Secondly, Private Mode only works with WiFi Access Points (AP), e.g. your WiFi routers. You can, however, use Private Mode with smartphones which can turn on "Internet Sharing" modes (newer iOS/Android devices will have this feature) which you can configure it's AP name. Another alternative is to use a mobile WiFi router, such as the Yes 4G Huddle. This does not solve our problem with the unpractical use of Eye-Fi transferring huge data from the camera to the phone. The trick in using Private Mode is to only transfer files selectively.

I'll share how to setup selective transfer and what Direct Mode is all about in the next article. Stay tuned!

Edit: I sold my Eye-Fi before I managed to write a second article. The main reason i sold it is simply that I don't have the time to edit a photo on-the-fly from my phone after taking a snapshot. :/