Eye-Fi announces Direct Mode link between digital cameras, smartphones

The Eye-Fi card, that miniscule mashup of Wi-Fi and memory card, will soon be able to send photos directly from your digital camera to your smartphone. TUAW has reported on these SD cards before, most recently when the company announced the Geo-X2 card's availability at Apple retail stores.

In the past, using an Eye-Fi provided a fast way to share high-resolution photos once you were near a Wi-Fi hotspot, but if you were out of range of Wi-Fi, you were stuck with the lower-resolution photos from your smartphone camera. Eye-Fi has announced Direct Mode, which uses new technology in the cards and a free Eye-Fi mobile app that will let users send photos directly to their smartphones for sharing. Think of this as tethering a digital camera directly to the Eye-Fi View service through an iPhone -- it's a great way to back up photos immediately to the user's Eye-Fi View account.

The app and the Direct Mode firmware update will be available later this year for free.

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Source: http://www.eye.fi/press-releases/great-images-and-instant-gr…

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The Eye-Fi card, that miniscule mashup of Wi-Fi and memory card, will soon be able to send photos directly from your digital camera to your...

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Dave Levin

in response to steve, a friend has been using his d90 with an eye-fi card without problem for quite some time. Don't know what version of the card you or he have...but I do know that some combination must work.

January 05 2011 at 2:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

steven

Warning: If you own a Nikon D90, do not buy an Eye-Fi card. The card is incompatible with the camera and Eye-Fi is doing nothing to rectify the problem.

January 04 2011 at 4:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

JClark

I love the idea of these cards, but the only non-phone camera that I ever use any more is an SLR, and I always shoot in RAW. Geotagging doesn't work with RAW files, and they're often too large to make the automatic upload/backup features worth while. By the time they add geotagging to RAW files (not simple since there are so many different, proprietary RAW formats), GPS chips will probably be built into every camera made (except Canon's, they don't seems to think geotagging is worthwhile).

January 04 2011 at 1:54 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to JClark's comment

bac

It is not true that RAW files cannot be geocoded. My Nikon D-300 does it with the Nikon GP-1 GPS. It may be true of some cameras but not Nikon SLRs.

January 05 2011 at 5:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jlombardo

It would be nice if the Eye-Fi card pulled GPS info from the iPhone to Geotag photos.

January 04 2011 at 1:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Thad Judkins

Nice, I was placing and cancelled an order a few days ago (new camera for christmas) once I checked and found out that this isn't what the iPhone app they released does. I'll probably hold off til I see the app though, later this year could be a long time away.

January 04 2011 at 1:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Phil Martin

could this also allow you to control your camera with your iPhone? I want an app that does that.

January 04 2011 at 12:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Phil Martin's comment

Brett

Not possible with this... the SD Card slot does not have instruction-passing capabilities that could be directed to the shutter/settings controls. You'd have to get a specific add-on for that; I believe there are options out there for some Nikon and Canon models.

January 04 2011 at 1:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply