The good folk at Eye-Fi have established a solid reputation for producing cool WiFi enabled SD cards which can transfer data from cameras to phones and other devices without cables, and they’ve just announced a cool new upgrade to their product range functionality.
The new EyeFi Mobi Desktop is a free software upgrade you can download which will let you transfer photos and videos from your DSLR camera to your Windows or Mac desktop or laptop computer wirelessly using an EyeFi Mobi card.
The card has always offered instant wireless transfer from camera to phones and tablets, but now they’re extending this to desktop computers, which is arguably much more useful, since it makes editing a simple affair. For those who are unfamiliar with the technology, the cards contain a WiFi transmitter, and because they are exactly the same size and shape as an SD card, you can insert them into any camera which accepts SD storage cards in place of standard SD cards.
Once installed, the card will automatically beam all videos and photos to a nearby phone or tablet computer via WiFi, no nasty cables needed. Now you can do the same to a computer. The cards support a massive range of cameras, and in our tests we found that the new software worked perfectly to move photos from a Sony NEX to a desktop Windows 7 PC. The only slight glitch was the fact that you need to clear the Windows firewall before selecting a destination folder, otherwise the install process fails.
There’s also a very cool function in the software which let you auto import your day’s shoot straight into Adobe Lightroom for post-processing. This is a great way to enhance your workflow, especially if you typically take quite a lot of shots during a session, because you’ll have instant editing access as you shoot, as the images are automatically transferred when you take them. Great feature, and one the professionals spend a lot more money to implement.
The EyeFi Mobi range of wireless WiFi SD cards starts at $49.99.