Although I have not tried one of these, I want one since it has some very intriguing uses. A company called Eye-fi has an offering that is a 2 gig SD card (the same SD memory cards like you use now to store pictures on your digital camera) but this one includes a built-in wifi card all in a normal sized SD memory card. You pop the eye-fi card in your camera and you have 2 gigs of storage and your camera can access your home wireless network to automatically upload your pictures to your PC or even online services like Flickr, Shutterfly, or even Costco (there are 20 services available currently). This card even does geotagging which is the ability to automatically tag each photo with a location of where you are when the picture is taken. Systems like Google’s Picasa, Flickr, and others can use this information.
So why would I want one?
- Immediate transfer of your photo’s. I can’t tell you how many times I take pictures and then forget to plug my camera in to a PC to upload. Then when I do, I need to compare what has been uploaded already so I get the recent ones uploaded. With the Eye-fi card, you can just turn on the camera and it will automatically upload them, never needing to plug the camera in to a PC. Amazingly, the battery overhead is supposed to be only about 5%.
- Geotagging. Although I do not do geotagging currently, I can see this being a valuable feature. Finding historical pictures can be difficult. I store mine for the most part by date range, but it could be real advantageous to be able to also pull up a map and zoom in the locations of where the pictures were taken to find the appropriate ones. You can check this out to see how this works http://www.flickr.com/help/screencasts/vol2
You can even use this card for security if you get lucky like one person did when their camera was stolen. Check out the article here.
You can check them out here http://www.eye.fi/
