Eye-fi & DropBox for events with live (almost) previews

A birthday party was on the horizon, and I wanted to have a live (or as close as possible) screening of the photos being shot during the event.

Importing images every 1/2 hour seemed quite tedious.

So the following solution came into placee:

Camera: 5Dm3, CF card for RAW files, Eye-Fi S card for Small JPG Mid-Resolution

Eye-fi setup - download ONLY jpg files.

Certain Eye-fi cards are able to transmit RAW files.  These can be HUGE - anywhere from 20~30mb on Canon cameras and as massive as 40-75Mb PER PICTURE on a Nikon D800!

The goal here is to get as close to real time as possible.  Thus, set the writing of SMALL JPG to the Eye-Fi - this speeds things up considerably.

Step 1: check the Eye-fi functionality - make sure that RAW transmission is OFF, video transmission is OFF, Geotagging is OFF, Uploads to Media Sites (e.g. Flickr) is OFF - keep things as simple as possible removing unnecessary steps.

Step 2: Setup DropBox **** THIS HAS BEEN UPDATED - I now use BitTorrentSync for this ****

If you don't already use DropBox - you should.  Go to www.DropBox.com create an account and you get 2Gb of free space to use.  This in essence functions as a cloud mirror to a folder (including its sub-folders) which is located on your computer.

The great part of this is that not only is it easy to share files with other users just by sending them a link to a file within your DropBox folder, but you can actually share folders.  And anything you put there, will not only be sent up to the cloud, but will also be mirrored to any other account/computer that you've setup sharing with.

What you want is a shared DropBox folder - I called mine "share screen saver photos"

Once setup, I return to my Eye-fi settings, and choose "~/Dropbox/share screen saver photos/" as my *save to* location.  This is where Eye-fi will dump everything that it receives on my notebook!

Step 4: Link to the Dropbox folder on another computer

Having a mac-mini connected to a TV for kids media - I installed Dropbox there - and - you guessed it, connected it to the shared folder "share screen saver photos".

Dropbox immediately started to pull down all the pictures in that folder.

Step 5: Setup the screen saver photo folder on your "other computer"

On a mac, you can set this folder as your "pictures" folder for the system screen saver in the system preferences.

For a windows machine, you can follow the simple instructions which are kindly provided by Microsoft.

Testing the workflow:

I ad my notebook setup in the corner, connected to wifi, and ready to receive Eye-fi photos, which are transmitted from the Eye-fi card in the camera.  As they are downloaded, they are saved to the designated Dropbox folder, which gets mirrored on the TV machine - which populates the screen saver slide show from that very same folder.  As images get added to the stream, the slide show gets new images - and every one at the even can see some fun shots and a different perspective on the event.

With the camera set to shoot low res JPGs to the Eye-fi, and Eye-fi software configured for minimal work, I was getting consecutive pictures up on the TV within 20-30 seconds.  A few large bursts and this slows down somewhat.  The first shot of a sequence (after a pause in shooting) does take longer - sometimes as long as a minute or two.

Expanding before the event:

I borrowed a three year old MacBookAir with a broken display from work.  Connecting it to a 24" monitor, I was able to setup another display following steps 3 through 5 above, and I had two displays with different timing settings showing an ever expanding slide show throughout the course of the event.

Lessons learned:

As the event went on... I that placement of the screens was great.  But - as the number of shots increased, so did the slide show, and it would take longer and longer for the new images to come up on the screen.

My solution was take a 2-3 mins every hour or so (depending on image volume) and from my notebook running Eye-fi, I would junk blatant dud-shots (out of focus, color balance checks, flash misfires, etc,,) anything which is spotted immediately.  Also, I'd move a lot of the older images to another folder.  This would effectively, delete all of these moves from Dropbox and all machines sharing this folder - again updating the slide show on each screen.

I found that when I do the purge, leaving somewhere between 20-30 images works well.  As the folder grew to over 300 images, the slide shows got - well - boring.  Early images have been rotated way too many times, and the wait for newer ones was excessive.

Another great benefit - if anyone asks for a picture that you just took (as they see it on your camera display), you'll be able to email it to them within a minute or so!



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As wifi capabilities appear in cameras this workflow will undoubtedly change, and improve.  This can already be seen with various compact point & shoot cameras as well as dSLR bodies such as the Canon 6D.

Makes for great fun with a fish-eye lens during a party!

The great thing here, is you still have the full RAW files on the other card - waiting for that downloading and processing session!


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Make	Model	SD Card	CF Card	XQD Card	MS Pro Duo - Memory Stick	Works with this tip!
Canon	1Dx				-
Canon	1D Mark IV	1	1	-	-	GREAT
Canon	5D Mark II	-	1	-	-	no
Canon	5D Mark III	1	1	-	-	GREAT
Canon	6D	1	-	-	-	OK
Canon	7D	-	1	-	-	no
Canon	350D-650D	1	-	-	-	OK
Canon	30D ~ 50D	-	1	-	-	no
Canon	60D & 60Da	1	-	-	-	OK
					-
Nikon	D4	-	1	1	-	no
Nikon	D3s	-	2	-	-	no
					-
Nikon	D300s	1	1	-	-
Nikon	D600				-
Nikon	D800 & D800e				-
Nikon	D7000	2	-	-	-	GREAT
Panasonic	Lumix	1	-	-	1	OK
Pentax	645D	2	-	-	-	GREAT
Sony	A77
Sony	A99
Sony	A550	1	-	-	1	GREAT
Sony	A200	-	1	-		no
Sony	NEX-6	1	-	-	-	OK
Sony	NEX-5R	1	-	-	1	GREAT