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Rant

EYE-FI sd cards scheduled to brick themselves in Sept.

Jul 1, 2016 5:07PM PDT

Just super aggravated that Eye-fi is discontinuing support for the X2 line of their SD cards. I don't know about other users, but I don't even use their enhanced features... nothing in the cloud, not even mobile usage. To me its just a card using my local network to automatically and seamlessly transfer images from my camera to my PC in the background. One of life's little pleasures.

Lack of "Support" usually means no more upgrades or such, which is fine by me. I actually prefer that! but to just no longer work?!?!? Crazy!!!

There's 2 local Windows desktop components and a card in my camera. Why should they even have the ability to disable it???

arggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh


http://x2migration.eyefi.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200718987-X2-Support-Update

I love one guy's question "Did I buy the card or just rent it?"

Discussion is locked

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I think we have 3 or 4 of these.
Jul 1, 2016 5:10PM PDT

The direct mode we use is unaffected and in the 5 years we had them I never saw an update.

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eye-fi explained
Jul 2, 2016 4:09PM PDT

what do you mean by "direct mode". I think that will definitely be affected. Did you get an email announcement on 6/29 or 7/1? Do they have your updated email address?

Even though you may not think you are using the Eye-Fi Center when transfers occur, according to support you are and are always logged in. The accounts will disappear on Sept 16 and login will be invalidated. Supposedly that will brick the app that drives the card transfers.

My common sense and tech background has a hard time wrapping my head around why something that is completely local to my computer and network should be dependent on their online services, but they claim so. I am hoping they mis-spoke and only cloud uploads are going away or some other use case. I too have never gotten an update in the several years I've had it.

To those unfamiliar with eye-fi cards, it is a special SD card that adds wi-fi capability to the camera. The app on my PC (only when its on of course) is polling for updates and when new pictures are found, it transfers them via wi-fi to a folder on my PC that I have directed it to use. It even has a feature to delete older pics on the card so only 50% (or whatever I specify) of the card is ever used. Once its on my PC, I really don't need anything on the card. So the card can never fill up.

The eye-fi center desktop app (which allegedly will brick on 9/16/16) is used to configure the card for folder destination and SSID settings. I backed up the XML settings folder so perhaps I can edit that in the future instead of using eye-fi center app in case it is still usable in a hobbled way.

Most likely this is a push to get us to purchase newer generation cards. No way!!

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Some folk get upset about it.
Jul 2, 2016 5:10PM PDT

Here we make money on the setup and if it bricks, we'll move to newer cards. The cost savings over the old methods were enormous so small change in the big picture.

I know this will likely upset a lot of folk but here, at some point companies with CLOUD systems will shut down and move on.

Did you ever read what Wozniak wrote about clouds. It's not nice.

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no cloud involved
Jul 4, 2016 1:07PM PDT

These pics have nothing to do with the cloud. They are on *MY* card in *MY* camera. Software that *I* purchased loads the pictures to *MY* hardrive. No leasing or free cloud space involved.

I concur with your implied assertion that clouds are unreliable. That is why I make sure my pics go on *MY* computer.

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First time I heard of such thing.
Jul 1, 2016 5:58PM PDT

How does it work (cloud storage), the company charge you a service fee every month or what? Why do you need them? I am just curious and puzzle.

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We used it in a factory system.
Jul 2, 2016 10:08AM PDT

We needed a nearly automatic system to take pictures of finished products and without any work by the factory folk, collect and store the results.

It was dirt cheap and while it was just a demo system we used the eyefi card to make up the secret sauce for the system. No updates or clouds were needed because of the direct options we used.