# Eye-Fi Card Reliability



## dmills (Feb 10, 2014)

I've been using an eye-fi card for about a year and a half now, and generally, it's been ok. Here's what I do:
With my 5d3, I shoot full-size RAW to my CF card and Medium JPG to my eye-fi 8gb card in the SD slot. I don't (usually) shoot professionally, but I do shoot photos related to my job as a school principal. (Events, etc) For most of my personal photos, I want and use the RAW photos. For most of the school photos, I just take the jpgs as they are and use those (even Medium JPG are plenty big enough for photo album size photos, and web). 

Bringing it back to the eye-fi card, when I am shooting events where I'm sitting down and watching, I love to have the eye-fi card sending to shutter snitch. My wife and I can view the images as I'm shooting them, and she can even share them on facebook/blog post straight from the event while I'm shooting. These events aren't in places with wi-fi, so I rely on the eye-fi card's ad-hoc network.

And now my question: Though the reliability is generally good, I notice that the eye-fi card and the ipad seem to fairly often lose connection. I can fix the problem by opening up the ipad settings and reselecting the eye-fi network, but I wondered if there was a way to boost the reliability of the setup. Would adding a wireless router into the mix (Eye-fi -> Wireless Router -> Shuttersnitch) make things more reliable? Or would adding in another device actually complicate matters? Also, would there be any affect on the speed of the file transfers? I know that the base components are still the same, but I wondered if the eye-fi card having to create its own ad-hoc network slowed the speed compared to just connected to a wireless network. 

Does anyone use a portable wireless router with an eye-fi card + ipad with any success? The only thing I could find on the forum was a post (with no replies) saying that every option was unreliable. While I haven't found that to be the case, I wondered what other people in similar situations were doing.

Thanks!


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## priyadi (Feb 10, 2014)

From my experience, Eye-fi in direct mode is very unreliable. Sometimes the card gets too hot and it wouldn't respond at all. I had to take the card out and let it cool before I can use it again. Another problem: it takes more than a few seconds before my iPhone/iPad can see the Eye-fi AP. If I switch my camera off, the AP is brought down, and it is going to take another few seconds again before connection can be made. Oh, and if I happen to be in an area where there's another saved AP signal nearby, sometimes the iPad will try to connect to the wrong AP. I had to make iPad forget the saved AP (and with iPad this can only be done if I'm near the signal).

I can guarantee all the horror stories about Eye-fi are related to direct mode 8).

Now I disabled direct mode and setup the Eye-fi card to connect to my Android tablet's "personal wifi hotspot". This is a MUCH more reliable setup. If I'm on assignment, I simply turn on personal wifi hotspot, and Eyefi will automatically forward pictures to my Android tablet. With an Android, the Eye-fi app is running as a service and will continue receiving pictures if I switch to another app or even turn it off. So I can just leave it in my backpack/pocket and it will continue to receive pictures without any intervention.

Haven't tried this myself (my old iPad 2 doesn't have Personal Hotspot feature), but you can try setting up Eye-fi to connect to your iPad personal hotspot and see if it works. Otherwise, a portable, battery powered AP is going to be a good investment.

Oh, and you might also want to consider switching to Android . Although there's no Shuttersnitch, and I don't have any experience with something like MoPhotos. At the moment I'm using the stock Eye-fi app, as it is good enough for me.


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## dmills (Feb 10, 2014)

Gotcha, thanks for the reply. I don't know if I'd say the reliability is 'bad'. It's more that, like you said, it takes some time before the different devices start playing nice. I've found that if I'm consistently taking photos (at least 1 photo every 10-15s), it will work (mostly) without fail. It's more that when they take a break or there's some downtime, that it doesn't want to pick things back up where they were.

Any recommendations for a portable router anyone?


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## priyadi (Feb 10, 2014)

dmills said:


> Gotcha, thanks for the reply. I don't know if I'd say the reliability is 'bad'. It's more that, like you said, it takes some time before the different devices start playing nice. I've found that if I'm consistently taking photos (at least 1 photo every 10-15s), it will work (mostly) without fail. It's more that when they take a break or there's some downtime, that it doesn't want to pick things back up where they were.



Yes, that's because in direct mode the Eye-fi card act as an access point, and your iPad connects to it. But the camera is not designed to supply power to its SD card all the time. It will stop sending power if you turn off the camera, or the camera times out. In my experience, even after changing 'Auto power off' setting to 'disable', it will not power the Eye-fi card forever. I used to half press the shutter button every 30 secs or so, just to keep the signal alive.

And the iPad appears to dislike AP that behaves like that. I don't know, maybe it marks AP signals that keep dropping out as 'bad', and sometimes just won't connect to it automatically.



> Any recommendations for a portable router anyone?



I had a Mifi (a Huawei E585) but can't recommend it for this purpose. It won't last 3 hours even if no device are connected to it. Before you go this route, consider that most modern computer, phone or tablet can act as an access point. A friend uses his laptop as access point, because he always has an assistant with his laptop on assignments.


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## nghgfg (Mar 1, 2014)

I think you should check out the RAVPower filehub. It allows you to transfer your pics, files wirelessly. Even more, it has buit-in battery for emergencies.


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## pwp (Mar 1, 2014)

nghgfg said:


> I think you should check out the RAVPower filehub. It allows you to transfer your pics, files wirelessly. Even more, it has buit-in battery for emergencies.


I checked the website: http://www.ravpower.com/ravpower-rp-wd01-filehub-3000mah-power-bank.html
Sounds interesting. Can you expand on how you implement this into your EyeFi and iPad scenario?

-pw


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