If you are like most casual photographers, you’ve probably heard that you should back up your photos, but there are a lot more fun things to do than worry about that. It doesn’t become crystal clear until you lose your favorite ones. One close by lightning strike, one errant virus or one erroneously placed magnet is all it takes to lose a lifetime of memories.
Eye-Fi to the rescue
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; and even though an Eye-Fi SD card weighs far less than an ounce, it can be the safety net you’d wished you had. If you were shooting your photos on any of Eye-Fi’s family of SD cards, you could have all your photos backed up to the cloud each time you have a Wi-Fi connection available.
When you open the package, don’t lose the registration number to set your card up on line. That’s the ticket to 90 days or one year of unlimited online storage depending on the card you purchase. After the initial free period, Eye-Fi’s price is $49.99/year for unlimited storage.
Convenience as well as safety
Safety aside, once the photos are in the cloud, you then have access to them from all your devices: PC, Mac, iOS, Android, you name it….no matter what device they were shot on.
Not only does the online storage hold the photos shot on the Eye-Fi SD cards, it also will keep track of your smartphone and tablet photos as well through the free Eye-Fi app. Each time you open it on your phone, any recent photos are uploaded to the cloud automatically.
View your photos by date, timeline, tags, camera shot, or by custom “smart views” using certain search criteria.
Once the photos are in the cloud, you can rotate them, crop them, tag them, add them to an album, download them, trash them or view them all as a full screen slideshow.
One of my favorite features is that you can select individual photos and get a link to share them with family or friends (or enemies.) When you send the link, the recipient gets a nice-size thumbnail view of all the photos which they can either view full screen or download.
If you share an entire album, each time you add new photos to the album, your recipients will be notified of the new additions. Hint – great for grandparents who want to see pics of the grandchildren.
Multiple cards – Multiple purposes
The Eye-Fi Mobi card (orange) is what most casual shooters will want – but is limited to transferring JPEG’s and movie files only. You can shoot RAW files on the card, but it will only sync JPEG and video. Cards are available in 8 and 16GB capacities. Eye-Fi cards are available in SD format only – no compact flash or MicroSD.
For those who shoot RAW, or want selective transfer, consider the MobiPro 32GB (black) card. Now you can wirelessly transfer RAW photos instantly over your home or studio Wi-Fi. Shoot and watch them instantly uploaded to Lightroom for example. Caution: remember that RAW files can be pretty huge and transfer time is not going to be seconds, like shooting JPEG’s. When I came back from a weekend’s shoot and had over a 1000 RAW and JPEG files on the card, it took hours and my camera battery died well before the photos had transferred. Be smart, and just insert the card in your computer to do the transfer. Even then, it’s going to take some time if you have a full 32GB card.
Luckily, both cards are rated Class 10 speed, which means they are capable of recording HD quality video without dropping frames. You can also transfer the files directly from your camera to your phone so you can share them instantly. With the MobiPro, you can also transfer RAW files to your phone for sharing in a reduced size.
Get all the information at http://www.eyefi.com