Travel Gear: Eye-Fi Card

The best travel brings me face-to-face with the unexpected.

I try to welcome the unexpected as part of the great adventure. Something to relish, a puzzle to solve, or an opportunity to practice wisdom and move on.

With a bit of luck, I get to choose whether to make the unwelcome a positive experience, or to allow it to suck the energy out of the day. Maybe there’s humor to find, lessons to learn, or a diversion to spice up an otherwise bland plan.

When our camera was stolen from our daypack in India, we both felt depressed for the rest of the morning. We had lost pictures of hikes 11,000 feet up in the Himalayas and walks around the Taj Mahal.

This led me to a solution that would prevent the loss of so many pictures again.

The solution was an Eye-Fi wireless memory card. Not only does it insulate us from losing our pictures, but it opens up new ways of enjoying them.

The Eye-Fi card replaces the memory card in a camera. It copies photos to a phone or the cloud, wirelessly, automatically, seamlessly.

Often, the latest photos are loaded on my phone before I turn off the camera.

We get to review and edit photos on the phone or a tablet over a beer in the evening, and to share via Twitter, Google+, or this blog.

I have two cards:

One card creates a Wi-Fi hotspot which an app on my phone recognizes. The app loads the new photos into the phone. A Google+ app then uploads the photos to Google+ in the cloud.

The other card recognizes our home Wi-Fi network, then uploads new photos to an Eye-Fi server in the cloud. The server transfers the photos to Google+ in the cloud. It also works with my portable router when we are travelling.

There are alternatives.

My phone has a half-decent camera.

Some cameras have built-in Wi-Fi.

Or, I can just live in the moment, and forget about photographs. I’ve posted here and here about vivid experiences in India when I had no camera.