The 2 Gig SD eyeFi card, a $99 WiFi/memory card, claims it can automatically upload photos from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.

The oft delayed SD card connects over a Wi-Fi network using its own onboard processor to transfer images from the card to a computer or upload the photos to eyeFi’s servers for further distribution.

The SD eyeFi card is tiny computer on an SD card. An Atheros single-chip AR6001GL ROC (Radio-on-a-Chip) mobile WLAN solution was chosen to provide 802.11g connectivity. It allows many different digital cameras, that currently take SD cards, to duplicate the functions of Wi-Fi cameras from Nikon, Canon, and Kodak. Eye-Fi says it works on most SD memory based cameras.

You create an account on the EyeFi site, then sign up for any of the 17 services. The company has partnered with 17 major photo-sharing sites to enable direct transfer of images. Photo partners include dotPhoto, Facebook, Flickr, Fotki, Gallery, Kodak Gallery, Phanfare, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, Sharpcast, Shutterfly, SmugMug, Snapfish, TypePad, VOX, Wal-Mart, and Webshots.

EyeFi says you can transfer full resolution photos to the host computer; transfer to eyeFi’s servers directly; or transfer to eyeFi’s servers and then download to the host computer. eyeFi’s servers automatically transfer the photos to the services you selected.

Engadet was underwhelmed;

The Eye-Fi only connects to trusted, encrypted, pre-configured networks, and doesn’t have any means of tunneling back to your home computer. That means you can’t just grab a seat at your local Starbucks and have the the card to dump the day’s photos to Flickr or your home RAID array.

You turn on your camera and your Eye-Fi will immediately start uploading your photos to a web service (or a folder on your machine). All of them — every photo on the card — and usually at native resolution, too. This kind of sucks because if you’re like most people, you: a) don’t upload EVERY photo you took to your photo stream, b) don’t upload said photos in full resolution

The 2 Gig eyeFi WiFi adapter is shipping now for $99.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 6:52 am.