Law Practice Today

My how things have changed. With built-in LCD screens on most digital cameras, you can immediately view each image. There’s no “film” to buy, so waste isn’t an issue. Snap away! The more shots you take, the higher the odds you’ll have some true keepers, and the feedback you get from instant replays helps you understand where you might have gone wrong with your angle or lighting. Email your pics around the globe. Choose the ones you want to put on paper. It’s been a wonderful evolution in photography.

Even so, to truly utilize the photos you’ve taken, you have to transfer them to your PC, unless you’re going to be satisfied with printing paper copies from a portable photo printer. My first digital camera, back in about 1994, had to be connected to my computer via a cable and special software was required to transfer and view the photos. A few years later, the Sony Mavica stored the images to floppy disks.

These days, the pictures are stored on “digital film” – compact flash cards, SD cards, or micro SD cards, and typically transferred to your machine via a reader built into your PC case, or a separate reader connected to it. It’s one more step to tackle before you can play with, or share, your snapshots. And if you’ve ever clicked on the shutter release button to capture a once-in-a-lifetime moment and discovered your SD card was back at your office or house, still in the card reader, you know why having to transfer photos via the card reader is not ideal.

With the Eye-Fi SD card, your digital film never needs to leave the camera. You can skip taking the card out, placing it in the reader, then returning it to the camera. Those steps are no longer necessary. Instead, the Eye-Fi card wirelessly transmits your photos from your camera to your computer. In addition, with some models of the card, you can configure the software to wirelessly upload your photos to whichever popular online photo sharing site you have an account with, from flickr or Picasa to facebook or snapfish.

The Eye-Fi SD card comes in different flavors and sizes. The basic model, Eye-Fi Home, works with your wireless network at home or the office. When your computer and camera are both on and you’re within range of your wireless network, the built-in wireless communication between the two devices occurs automatically and you can watch as a small window in the corner of your PC or Apple monitor shows the photos being uploaded. With 2GB of storage, this card will run you just under $80.00. If you wish to have your photos uploaded to a photo sharing site, you’ll need to do it manually once they’ve been transmitted to your computer. For a few bucks more ($99.99), the 2 GB Eye-Fi Share will upload both to your computer and to online sharing site you specify.

The Eye-Fi Explore Geotags your photos. By sensing the surrounding Wi-Fi networks as you take pictures, it figures out where you are, making it easy for you to sort your photos by location where they were taken. When the press of business recently took me to so many different places in a short time that I felt like a walking ad for Johnny Cash’s “I’ve been to . . . “ song, I was delighted to find that my smart little card kept it all straight and it knew where I had seen the troll under the bridge (Seattle), even if I couldn’t remember.

The Explore version also gives you Hotspot access free for one year, allowing you to upload from more than 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation. Just imagine – your photos could make it home before you do, plus they can be viewed on your photo sharing site before you’re even back from your tip, uploaded while you’re at the airport, in the hotel, at a local coffee shop. Eye-Fi Explore will set you back $129.99. If geo-tagging doesn’t light your candle, you can skip it and get the Eye-Fi Anniversary Edition for the same price. No geo-tagging with it, but you get 4 GB of storage, rather than 2.

Getting set up is easy. The card comes with a special reader which attaches to your computer via USB. Plug in the reader. Stick the card in. Launch the software. Follow the simple prompts to input the information about the directory you want the photos to be wirelessly transferred to in the future. And if you choose a card that connects to the photo sharing sites, enter the information about which one you use, your user name and password, and whether you want the photos placed into a public or private album. Pluck the Eye-Fi card out of the reader, pop it in to your camera, and you’re good to go!

Would you believe this timesaving tool can also be a crime-fighting device? A woman left a restaurant recently, then realized she had left her camera case behind. She rushed back, only to be told no one recalled seeing it, no one had turned it in. It was gone forever, she thought, but a few days later, she happened to visit the site where she shared photos with family and friends and was startled to see pictures of people she didn’t recognize, some of whom were holding on to items that had been in her camera case. Who were these people?!? Then she remembered she had recently begun using an Eye-Fi card and she had set up the software so that when the card was in the turned-on camera at a wi-fi hotspot, it would upload the pictures to her picture sharing site. There, clearly shown in the pictures, was the head waiter of the restaurant where her camera case had been left. A quick chat and a little “show and tell” with the manager resulted in the waiter being fired and all the camera equipment returned to its rightful owner.

Another tech toy, another happy ending!

Learn more at www.eyefi.com