Eye-Fi : Another Solution with its own Problems

There's a problem with digital cameras (for people who don't own Apple's): how do you get the pictures out of the camera and make use of them? You could connect the camera to your computer with the mini-USB cable (where is that?) and then connect to Shutterfly (Flickr, etc.) and upload the images to the (slow) internet. You could take the memory stick out, stick it in your printer, and work it that way. You could take the memory stick to Walmart and get prints.

These options are all good for Geeks Like Me™, but they're not good options for your Aunt Mary, who likes the internet but isn't technically adept.

Enter the Eye-Fi wireless memory card. You're on vaction and take some photos, it stores them. You go to a coffee shop and turn your camera on, your Eye-Fi card senses the cafe's WiFi hotspot and automatically uploads your photos to Shutterfly. By the time you get home, Aunt Mary has already seen the photos of your vacation and ordered her prints of Little Betsy at Six Flags.

Not only that, but the Eye-Fi attempts to put "geo-tags" on your photos. A geo-tab is embedded location information, tucked into the format of your image file. The problem is, true geo-tagging requires a GPS connection, and there isn't any GPS on the Eye-Fi - instead, it attempts to triangulate a position based on received and identified WiFi hotspots. No wifi hotspots, no ersatz geotagging - which is too bad, because that would have been very cool.

So I said to my SOⁱ, who dreads the tedious connect-the-camera-to-the-laptop-and-upload-pics-to-Shutterfly shuffle, Hey this is great, it'll automatically upload your photos via Wifi, wherever we go. And my SO said, What? And have strangers with Wifi sniffers seeing and copying our photos of Little Betsy at Six Flags?

And so, another almost elegant implementation of a new technology was relegated to the dustbin of early non-adoption, along with the Roomba 1.0 and the Betamax.