My ultimate wireless photo upload setup
When I finally bought an Eye-Fi card,
I thought it was going to be super cool, because I would be able to
dump pictures from the camera to my laptop without needing to mess with
card readers or USB cables. Unfortunately it didn't work out as
planned. Firstly, it didn't handle file types other than JPEGs (I
think with the firmware updates that have been released, Eye-Fi does
handle RAW files, too, but don't take my word for it). Secondly, you
couldn't choose which pictures to send to the computer, or when you
could upload them. You basically were uploading whatever you shot
after you put the Eye-Fi in the camera and started shooting. If you
were out shooting with the Eye-Fi card away from an AP and/or your home
WiFi and computer, you couldn't go back and select the pictures you
took after you got back home. Thirdly, you had to set up wireless APs
beforehand; you couldn't just scan for and use any old WiFi AP
available (again this may or may not be addressed now by new firmware
updates) on the fly. And the worst part was that you couldn't turn off
wireless scanning if you knew you wouldn't be in range of an open AP or
knew you didn't want to use wireless uploading for some reason. I
didn't think about this when I went to this year's Chicago auto show
and realized that my LX3's battery had died in about 15 or 20 minutes,
even though I fully charged it the night before. Luckily I had another
battery and a different SD card to use. At that point, I stopped using
the Eye-Fi altogether.
Now, it wasn't exactly that incident that soured me on the Eye-Fi,
though it was a big contributor. Also, many of the limitations with
the Eye-Fi result from the functionality being embedded in the card,
not the camera. So of course I know there's a limit to what the Eye-Fi
can do, given its form factor and how it was originally designed to
work. Some of the issues I mentioned have been addressed by firmware
updates, and sometime in the near future I'll revisit my Eye-Fi and see
what I can and can't do with it. I'd be happy to retract all of my
gripes if I find out they've all been fixed!
Actually, the main issue for me is that I normally like to edit my
pictures before posting them online. Mobile-wise, I really liked being
able to take pictures with my Sony Ericsson P1i, then do some
rudimentary editing with the built-in photo editing software. I did
some photo editing on my Nokia N95, but being limited to using
the joystick to do editing, and the limitations of the app itself meant
that I didn't really use it much. Processing photos was better on the
P1i because of the touchscreen. Also, I could optionally pen
annotations right onto the photo. I continued to do mobile photo
editing with my iPhone. At first the editing apps that showed up in
the App Store were pretty useless for me -- face melting, adding silly
frames and cutesy little stamps. :P But eventually the category
exploded and soon there were a ton of different photo processing apps,
from utilitarian to whimsical, that piqued my interest. I check that
category from time to time for new apps to try. I think it's pretty
cool how people have come up with some genuinely creative photo apps
for the iPhone.
I've posted before that I have a couple pet photo editing apps that I
love to use on the iPhone -- Photogene
and Tiffen's Photo
fx. Photogene is more like a Photoshop-type editor, whereas Photo
fx applies various filters to your picture. Cropping was recently
added to Photo fx, so if all you need to do before applying some
filters is to crop the picture, you can do it all within Photo fx.
Anyway, the "problem" with this setup is that the iPhone's camera is
not as good as my favorite P&S -- the LX3 -- or my D90. The iPhone
is fine for moblog snapshots, but if I want to upload pictures from my
other cameras, I have to wait until I'm home, sift through the pictures
on the card, copy over the ones I want to edit, edit them, add title,
description, and tags, and then upload them. Or, do this on the go
with my laptop and hope I can connect to a WiFi AP somewhere because I
don't yet have a MiFi or
some other method to tether my laptop to a mobile broadband account.
Perhaps you already know where this is going: my ultimate wireless
picture-taking and uploading setup would be to take pictures with my
LX3, D90 or any other digital camera, then wirelessly transfer certain
pictures to some mobile device that would allow me to edit the picture,
add metadata, then upload it. Alternatively I could do the editing
in-camera (both the LX3 and D90 seem to have some rather decent
in-camera editing tools) and then just use the mobile device's data
connection to upload to Flickr or elsewhere. I envision a couple
different scenarios to accomplish this:
1. A device like an Eye-Fi or some other dongle connected to the camera
communicates with my iPhone and either lets me copy the picture over to
edit on the iPhone, or I edit the picture beforehand in-camera. Then I
use a photo uploader app on the iPhone to upload the picture to Flickr
or wherever else via the iPhone's 3G or WiFi connection. For the
briefest of moments, I thought perhaps that was what Eye-Fi's iPhone
app was going to enable. How sorely disappointed I was when I found
out it was basically an uploader like Flickit (my Flickr uploader of
choice on the iPhone) for pictures taken with the iPhone. WHAT?
*facepalm*
I understand that the Eye-Fi uploader could have been restricted by the
iPhone's SDK somehow, but it would've been awesome if Eye-Fi could've
worked out a deal with Apple to implement the type of uploader I
described. Can you imagine how many people would consider the iPhone
if it could act as a mobile broadband gateway for any camera using an
Eye-Fi card? What up, Eye-Fi? Apple?
2. A mobile device such as the mythical (but hopefully soon-to-be
real?) Mac tablet would be even better than a smartphone in this
situation because it could have more processing power and more screen
real estate in case I want to do more "serious" editing for a
particular shot. Then I could feasibly use Photoshop Elements or
something else to do the editing and have the regular arsenal of tools
at my disposal. The touchscreen on the tablet would be like a Wacom
tablet, enabling easier manipulation of the editing software with your
fingers.
Before anybody balks at me, I realize that it may be possible to do
scenario number 2 with a camera, an Eye-Fi, a laptop or netbook (or
UMPC if you go that way *smirk*), and a MiFi. I'm guessing that you
would be able to set up the Eye-Fi to see and use the WiFi AP that the
MiFi provides (if that's what the MiFi does; I'm guessing). That's all
well and good, but as I've realized when I've carried my MacBook with
me along with all my camera gear to the yearly visit to the Detroit
auto show, carrying all this stuff is friggin' heavy! A device smaller
and lighter than my MacBook is preferred. As an aside, I actually
tried to use my N810 in a very kludgy setup with an external hard drive
and a card reader to be a photo bin and/or a mobile photo uploader.
The setup never really worked, unfortunately, and it was too unwieldy
with all of the cords and external devices to be useful in a mobile
setting anyway. :P
I would probably feel differently if I had a netbook with enough
horsepower to run a photo editing app like Photoshop Elements. That
might be what I'm missing, along with the MiFi. But I still am holding
out for a Mac tablet as my dream device to be my photo editor and
upload gateway. It might not work as well as I planned if the Mac
tablet ends up basically being a large-screened iPhone, running the
embedded version of OS X. In that case, the photo editing apps might
be limited to those already found on the iPhone. That's okay for the
most part, since I try not to do that much editing beyond cropping and
a little bit of levels and shadow/highlight fixes. But I would love
something like a slate tablet computer that can do full Photoshop
Elements or Aperture, if we're talking about the ideal scenario. I
really liked editing photos in slate mode on my Tablet PC back in the
day. :) But I am primarily an OS X user now, hence my wish for a Mac
tablet. YMMV.
I picked on the Eye-Fi a bit in my post, but really this semi-gripe
applies to any of the cameras out there that have built-in WiFi or use
dongles for WiFi connectivity. Often these cameras are locked into
specific online services as well, which make them even less useful for
my personal workflow. They never end up simply being a camera that
connect to a wireless AP on the fly and upload pictures to any site.
One last thing: an alternate or parallel scenario is for the iPhone or
some other cameraphone to have a decent enough camera so that I don't
have to use a separate camera. However, given the technical
restrictions on sensors and such, I don't see any cameraphones in at
least the next 2 or 3 years being as good as my LX3 or similar creative
P&S with regards to low-light capability, fine detail, or depth of
field, nor would they be as good as a DSLR. However, an iPhone with at
least a 5 or 6 MP camera, autofocus, macro mode, and modest optical
zoom would be a great moblogging device. I almost went with one of
Sony Ericsson's Cybershot models before I decided on the iPhone 3G
because they are more like cameras with phones shoehorned into them. I
really like SE's cameraphones, and as I mentioned in a previous
post, the Satio is a phone I'm keeping an eye on. But I'm so
invested now in the iPhone and its apps (and iTunes) that it would take
a pretty spectacular phone to pry me away from the iPhone family.
