Eye-Fi & iPad

If someone knows where I can buy the Apple iPad Camera Connector, PLEASE let me know. I just grabbed another brass ring off the iPad carousel.

Eye-Fi on its own is cool enough. Send digital photos from your camera to your desktop via 802.11n (2.4 GHz only)  for editing, to various online photo sharing sites, Facebook, and so on. It sure beats connecting cables or removing cards from a camera.

I thought that the advertised free iPhone app for Eye-Fi (available in the App Store of course) might be useful on my iPad since its function is to send photos from the iPhone via 3G to your desktop or a supported online photo sharing site (Facebook, Flickr, MobileMe, Picasa, Smugmug). And I was right.

Surprisingly, there was virtually no setup to speak up. You authenticate by entering the credentials for your Eye Fi account and the little app “just works”. Once I logged in, the computer showed an additional tab on the left labelled iPhone (which I promptly changed to iPad). A settings window popped right up (and it can be accessed at any time) that let me specify a folder hierarchy and type and some other options.

Back on the iPad, since there is no camera and because I don’t yet have my hands on the camera connector for iPad, I was able to upload photos stored on the device. I used this feature to take the screen captures I made of the Eye Fi functionality on the iPad and send them to my desktop for editing and inclusion in this post.

Well, I can’t take a photo with the iPad as I said, but I sure can choose an existing photo and upload it. I just selected my Saved Pictures folder on the iPad and selected three images. The two above and one showing all the saved screen shots (appears below as iPhone005.JPG inside the Windows Explorer image).

I could tell the image uploads were completed via both a tool tip in the system and the Eye-Fi center window below.

Here’s the Windows Explorer view.

Yup, this is way cool. I really want to get my hands on that iPad Camera Connector. I’m relishing the thought of all my pictures being uploaded and ready for editing on the home computer when I walk in the front door at the end of a day of photo shooting.