Eye-Fi: Put A Little Magic On Your Wall

I’ve posted here before about the Eye-Fi cards, and how easy and magical they are.  I haven’t changed my mind; in fact, I grow more and more crazy about Eye-Fi with each passing day!

Eye-Fi even has its own Flickr account, and if you go there you can see, among other things, tons and tons of awesome BlogHer pictures!  Imagine – your Eye-Fi card will send your pictures back to your computer the very instant you snap them!  It’s REAL-TIME wireless pictures, folks.

If you’re still not comprehending the coolness of an Eye-fi card in your digital camera, let me put it this way:  when I was at BlogHer in Chicago last weekend, taking pictures right and left, my husband,  who had been “left behind” in southern Indiana, was watching these pictures appear as if by magic, on our wireless digital picture frame, seconds after I took them.  My brother, in Idaho, was keeping up with me, too; these same pictures were appearing, real-time, on HIS wireless picture frame, a couple of thousand miles away!  Simultaneously, my mother was keeping track of me as she sat in her Lazy-Boy recliner and watched in wonder as my pictures started apearing on her wireless Digital Spectrum MF 8104.

In fact, we all have a Digital Spectrum MF 8104 wireless digital picture frame.  It’s fantastic.

We all have FrameChannel accounts, too – my whole family.  The combination of FrameChannel and Eye-Fi is so fantastic, it’s almost Harry-Potterish!  Your Eye-Fi will send your pictures directly to your photo-sharing site, whereupon your FrameChannel account will immediately access them and your wireless digital frame will start including them in your slideshow!

Why not put a little magic on your wall with the combination of an Eye-Fi card and a wireless digital picture frame?  As I type this, pictures of my nephew in Idaho are beginning to appear on my wireless frame.  It’s prom night out there, and I got to see him just a few minutes before he left to pick up his date.  REAL TIME.

You can buy Eye-Fi cards almost anywhere fine electronics are sold, but why don’t you check them out on Amazon?  The shipping is free!

Kogan Wireless Digital Picture Frame Is Compatible with Twitter, Facebook, Photobucket, and Flickr

Kogan’s new 8-inch LCD high resolution (800 x 600) wireless digital picture frame allows you to send your pictures to almost any social media network!

According to Kogan founder Ruslan Kogan, “Social Networking has become extremely popular.  With the release of the Kogan Wi-Fi Wireless digital Photo Frame we have looked to combine photo sharing capabilities of social network websites and the digital photo frame.  The world of technology is about immediacy and through being able to rapidly upload photos to your digital photo frame, gives you the opportunity to view the latest photos of your family and friends straight away.”

Customers will also be able to upload digital pictures via email with the new Kogan frame, for each frame has its own email address.

Besides being able to get pictures from Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and other social media sites, you can also manage your images with Kogan’s free web-hosted service for the central management of your pictures.

If you have an iPhone, you can download the FREE SeeFrame app from Kogan’s App Store, install, and send photos directly from your iPhone!

If several family members or friends have the Kogan wireless frame, these users can set up a single email aaddress that will be shared by all the frames, making photo sharing even easier and more convenient.

The Kogan wireless frame is also environmentally sound, for it can be programmed to turn off automatically at night, to save power and protect the screen.

This Kogan 8″ wireless digital photo frame will be available in July of 2009.

iGala Wi-Fi Linux Based Photo Frame

ThinkGeek put the word out about the new iGala Wi-Fi Linux-based photo frame!

Unlike other digital photo frames that just accept memory cards and show photos, the iGala has a brain inside its rectangular head. Use the touchscreen interface to configure the iGala to connect to your wi-fi network, then the iGala can do all kinds of smart things like login to a Gmail account and display any e-mailed photos on its hi-res 800×600 screen.

Of course the iGala can pull your photos automatically from Flickr and you can connect to Windows Live FrameIt or FrameChannel if you’re looking for a free web based interface to automatically push photos, news and traffic to your frame. No PC is required because the iGala is essentially a mini touchscreen computer running Linux.

FrameChannel or FrameIt?

The iGala frame comes in two models, one for FrameChannel service (http://www.framechannel.com) and one for Windows Live FrameIt service (http://frameit.live.com). They are both customizable web service platforms to manage the intelligent delivery of personalized content to wireless digital picture frames.

You are not required to use either of these two services. The iGala is perfectly capable of receiving photos sent via e-mail and handling Flickr RSS feeds of photos all by itself.

FrameChannel offers a library of hundreds of channels of content, all optimized for viewing on wireless picture frames. These include text based channels that are converted to images such as news headlines, live weather forecasts, sports scores, and horoscopes as well as image content from sources like National Geographic, AP Images and other galleries shot by the top photographers from around the world. This content is then married with each user’s personal photos that can be uploaded to FrameChannel or pulled from a variety of supported photo sharing sites including Flickr, Picasa, Webshots, Facebook and others. Each user selects the channels that interest them, sets the rules for each channel and FrameChannel applies its rules engine to create a unique content stream for each user that is updated continually. The iGala frame also features a simple One-Click setup for FrameChannel service.

Microsoft’s Windows Live FrameIt service lets users customize a content feed that is delivered via RSS which is similar to FrameChannel. Users can customize weather data, news sources and their own photos via Live Spaces or SmugMug. Once users customized the channel on FrameIt website, they can input its Collection Name on iGala to display its content.

The main difference between the two services is the scope of their image content collections. iGala users will be able to switch between FrameIt and FrameChannel services by performing an easy firmware refresh on the iGala frame.

Product Features

• Wi-Fi enabled photo frame can pull photos from Gmail and Flicker and has touch screen interface for network configuration
• 8″ 4:3 800X600 Digital LCD
• No PC Needed for Setup, No Subscription Fees for Online Use
• Full Screen Touchscreen Interface
• No PC Needed for Setup
• Linux based operating system
• Wifi 802.11b/g with WEP, WPA and WPA2
• 1GB Internal Memory Stores over 5,000 images
• Auto Synchronization with Flickr Photo Sets
• Access to Flickr Private Photos
• Email Photos to Frame
• Windows Live FrameIt or FrameChannel Support for Photos, News and Weather
• Insert SD media card to display photos from the card
• USB Mass Storage Connectivity
• MP3 Support to Play Music
• Auto Power Saving
• 110V/250V AC Adapter
• Clock and Alarm Function

Buffalo PF-50WG 8″ Wireless Digital Photo Frame

Buffalo has updated its wireless digital PF-50WG Digital Picture Frame with Microsoft Live FrameIt, which will allow Buffalo wireless frame owners to synchronize their Windows Live photo Albums with the wireless frame.  This update will be available on Buffalo’s website from the middle of May 2009.

The Buffalo PF-50WG 8-inch wireless digital picture frame is compatible with many file formats, including JPEG, BMP, Mp3, AAC, Mpeg, and 3GPP. It also features an 8-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 800 x 600. the USB port, Wifi b/g, calendar, and clock functions further increase the frame’s versatility. The frame has 85MB of internal memory, and is compatible with most memory cards.

Buffalo wireless frames were already compatible with other online picture store sites, such as Flickr and Picasa, and with the Microsoft Live FrameIt update, the Buffalo frame is even more versatile!

RSS functionality makes your wireless digital picture frame much more than merely a picture frame. A wireless picture frame can display almost anything that has an RSS feed, which means that, interspersed with pictures of friends, family, pets, vacations, and great works of art, you can also view your local weather, sports scores, news, business, financial updates, trivia, quotations, comics, your favorite columns, and pretty much ANYTHING you want.

I hope that Buffalo will consider adding FrameChannel access to its wireless digital picture frames, as I have found FrameChannel to be the very best content provider available today.

The suggested price for the Buffalo PF50-WG is about 160 Euros, or approximately $250.00.