The Eye - Fi app receive images at once from my photographic camera . I’ve been using the Eye - Fi series of Wi - Fi - enable computer storage card for a brace of age now . But I have to admit , they ’ve always been cool on newspaper publisher than in practice . Yes , they countenance your photographic camera connect to a Wi - Fi web and upload photos to picture - sharing military service and even back to your Mac , and there ’s some Wi - Fi - based geotagging capableness . But camera interface just are n’t copious enough to give users control over the Eye - Fi ’s feature out in the landing field , and most of the place I take pictures do n’t have Wi - Fi . Without a Wi - Fi connection , there ’s no way to send back the picture show and the geotagging feature wo n’t work , either .

But of late two developments have made me reevaluate the time value of an Eye - Fi poster . First was the arrival of the iPhone’spersonal hotspot feature , which eliminated the job of the Eye - Fi card not being able to find oneself a Wi - Fi web when I ’m out taking a hike . With the Eye - Fi set to connect to my iPhone 4 ’s personal hotspot , it can partake my iPhone ’s cellular - data point connection .

But even better was the entry of “ Direct Mode ” , a featurerolled out in April for the X2 serial of cardsthat turns the Eye - Fi wit inside a camera into a portable hot spot . Here ’s how it works : you link up your iPad or iPhone to the Eye - Fi card once so that your iOS machine retrieve the name and password of your Eye - Fi batting order ’s hotspot . Then , when you ’re out shooting , you launch the free Eye - Fi app and the pictures you ’ve taken will be channelise wirelessly from your television camera to the app and saved at full resolution in the Camera Roll on your iOS equipment .

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The Eye-Fi app receives images directly from my camera.

I examine this feature out last weekend at one of my girl ’s softball game . I turned on my Canon T2i DSLR photographic camera , establish the Eye - Fi app , and then stuck my iPhone in my air pocket and started to take pictures with my photographic camera . When I was done , a full - resolution transcript of all those photos from my T2i were on my iPhone , quick to be einsteinium - mailed , posted to Facebook and Flickr , and evenrun through Instagram .

Last workweek I write about how Apple engineering science changed how I bought a automobile . The encroachment of connected devices like iPhones into our life story continues to disrupt the creation in strange ways . If you had asked me a year or two ago , I might have contemplate about digital tv camera sum up Wi - Fi , GPS , and even cellular characteristic of their own , all controlled at once from the camera . But now it ’s harder for me to see that as a press penury . The phones we carry with us do most of those things , and with app - driven interfaces that are well-fixed to use . Maybe our camera would be better off just talking to our phones , rather than trying to do all these other Job themselves .

Meanwhile , back in the present tense , that Eye - Fi X2 plug-in I buy has suddenly become a lot more useful now that I can get all the photos I shoot with my full - sized cameras onto my iPhone 4 .

Pro X2