Eye-Fi Mobi

Two 'Eye-Fi Mobi' stories September 2013 - January 2014

Eye-Fi announces software for direct camera-to-Mac transfers

Wifi-equipped cameras have long been one of those things that promise more than they deliver. In theory, you can take a photo on your camera and have it instantly and wirelessly transferred to your Mac. In practice, not so much. You either need to go via an iOS device, or go via a router with ridiculously-convoluted networking configuration required to make it work.

Eye-Fi seems to be getting one step closer to the theory, announcing beta software at the Showstoppers CES event that allows photos to be sent direct from camera to Mac. The beta version is free, though you have to register for the company’s labs project to get access, but it seems the release version will be chargeable.

The app is only compatible with Mobi cards – earlier versions won’t work. Hopefully the reliability of the cards has improved since I last tried them.

Review: Eye-Fi Mobi, a cool idea let down by poor reliability

An increasing number of cameras these days have wifi built-in, allowing instant viewing of photos on your iPhone or iPad, and from there instant sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on. Which can leave those of us with less sociable cameras feeling a little left out in the cold.

Eye-Fi has offered solutions to this for some time, in the form of wifi-equipped cards that you can insert into your older or pro camera and transmit the images to a PC or Mac. This approach worked, after a fashion, but had two big problems. First, setup was far from easy, and second, transmission was via a wireless router. Fine at home, where you probably didn’t need it, not so fine when out & about, where you probably did.

This was the problem the Eye-Fi Mobi set out to solve: a $50 (8GB) or $80 (16GB) SD card that transmits photos direct to an iOS device running the free Eye-Fi app, with no router required. I decided to give it a try …
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