Eyefi Cloud uploads your photos as you snap them

Eyefi, the company behind the Mobi wireless SD card, has announced a new service designed to make uploading the photos from your digital camera to the web completely automatic. Eyefi Cloud can take images from your camera, as well as from a smartphone or tablet and upload them instantly, without having to manually add files yourself.

With the new service, anyone with an Eyefi Mobi card and a paired iOS or Android smartphone will be able to send any photos they take straight to the cloud as soon as they hit the shutter button. Once uploaded, you can manage your photos from any computer with a browser using the web interface.

If you’re worried about snapping through your month’s data allowance, there’s an option to only upload when connected to a Wi-Fi network. The apps will automatically back up any photos you snap with your phone as well, similar to how Dropbox and Google+ work now. According to Eyefi, Cloud’s servers send optimised versions of your images back to whichever device you’re looking at them on, so high resolution digital SLR images will be downscaled for smartphones, but will still have enough resolution when viewed on a high-resolution iPad Air.

Eyefi Cloud isn’t particularly suited to professionals, as it doesn’t yet support the older X2 Pro cards and it can’t back up RAW files, but for everyone else it could be the cheapest way to add wireless photo backup to a digital camera.

Existing Eyefi Mobi customers, and anyone picking up a card for the first time, will quality for 90 days’ free subscription to Eyefi Cloud. After that time expires, it will cost $49 for a year of unlimited uploads – an amount which compares favourably with the likes of Dropbox and Google+, even if you can only upload images and not other files. It’s currently unclear whether Eyefi Cloud will be launching in countries outside of the US, as there’s currently no price listing on the UK website, although there doesn’t appear to be anything stopping customers from signing up and paying in dollars.

In the meantime, you can get more information on the new service at www.eyefi.com