Eye-Fi Pro 4GB review

The Eye-Fi card is an SD camera memory card with a difference: as well as providing storage space (in this case 4GB), it also contains wifi hardware to connect with wifi networks.

Yes, that's right: it adds wifi connectivity to your camera, tags shots with location data if it can, and uploads photos and videos as they're taken or when you next get in range. CompactFlash adaptors aren't officially supported, though.

The Eye-Fi card needs to be set up with the access details of your wifi network, done by connecting the card directly to your Mac and using the Eye-Fi management software. This is also where you choose what services to include when moving your photos around - the 27 different services include Flickr, Facebook, MobileMe, MovableType, Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery and Snapfish. Videos can be sent to YouTube, Flickr and a few others.

If you don't want to upload every shot, you can set the card to only upload items that you set as locked in your camera. If you shoot Raw rather than Jpeg images, the card will save them on your Mac, but won't send them to the online service and storage locations.

Much of the Eye-Fi management can be done from a browser on any machine, and the card will happily send photos through wireless networks without your Mac having to be on at all. Those shots will be downloaded to your machine later, entirely automatically, and in the meantime they'll be posted to any online location that you set up.

We did have a few teething problems. The card tries to upload promptly, but if the camera goes into power-saving mode, it gets interrupted. It resumes smoothly but not always immediately, so adjust the power-saving settings in your camera if you can. We also found that some images uploaded while our Mac was asleep were downloaded over and over when the Mac went online again. But these hiccups were minor and manageable.

The bottom line is this: the Eye-Fi card turns your digital camera into a true Web 2.0 device, using wifi to integrate it with social networking, content sharing and printing services in simple yet extraordinary ways.