Eyefi has made a name for itself by giving wireless functionality to virtually any digital camera with its Wi-Fi-equipped Mobi SD memory cards. Today (Apr. 17), the company launched a new cloud service, called Eyefi Cloud, to let you share your newly captured photos instantly across devices such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop or smart TV. We gave it a try, and were impressed with the easy setup and simple operation of the service.
Eyefi Cloud costs an annual $49 fee for unlimited photo storage. The company's Mobi connected SD cards retail for $49, $79 and $99 for the 8GB, 16GB and 32GB versions respectively. Each card comes with a free 90-day trial of the cloud service, and you'll need at least one Eyefi Mobi card to sign up for the Cloud service at launch. If you already have a Mobi, you can sign up without getting a new card or any updates.
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You can view, edit, organize and share your photos on the go with the cloud service, and create private albums to share with specific groups of people by sending them a direct link. From the Web app, you can see whom you've shared the photos with as well as whether they've opened the link.
The company also introduced Desktop Transfer apps today for PCs and Macs to facilitate wireless transfers to your computer.
During a demonstration for Tom's Guide, all this syncing happened within seconds. It took more time for pictures to move from the camera to smartphone, but changes and uploads made on the phone showed up immediately on the web app.
We created a cloud account by going into Settings in the Mobi mobile app, but you can also do so via Eyefi's web portal. Within 30 seconds, we saw pictures show up on the web app via the cloud. According to Eyefi, you should see a note at the top of the app that tells you the progress of your upload, although we didn't see it in ours. This might be because we were testing a preview version of the app.
Our favorite feature of the cloud service is the ability to share albums privately with people, see if they've opened the link, revoke albums from specific people (if need be) and notify collaborators when the album is updated. Eyefi tells us it plans to add more editing tools to make its service more useful for collaboration. We're looking forward to seeing what they have to offer.
On the whole, Eyefi is a solid option to help connect older cameras to today's modern ecosystem, and the cloud service offers a seamless management system for busy photographers.
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