I’ve put off getting one of these for a long time, it seemed too fiddly for me, and they were touting it as a way to upload pictures to social media sites like Facebook and others.  They spoke so loudly and proudly about that feature that the basic functionality I was really looking for was mentioned in reviews almost as an after thought, as if relegated to the fine print.

What convinced me to try it was the trouble Mrs J was having remembering to load the pictures from her little Canon into the network drives we have set up on our local area network (LAN).  She would come in from the shelter and later would mention that she took some pictures of a really cute critter and would have to fetch the camera so I could pull the chip and copy them into a shared folder where they would be available to copy to a local machine for editing.  I generally resize photos I load for this blog, and try to tweak the colors and contrasts to add a little more oomph, and crop them a bit for composition, same thing with my Flickr account.  ProTip:  Always, always edit a copy!  Not the original!

Anyway, I ordered one, set it up and slotted it into her camera.  Set up was easy and fast, I didn’t have to send the pics anywhere I didn’t want them to go.  It seems like magic.  Take a photo and a little later it’s there in the designated folder.  Huzzah!  It’s a tad slow if you aren’t fairly close to the router – I can watch the upload progress bar speed up or slow down when carrying the camera towards or away from the wifi transmitter.  I haven’t tested it much, but if the pic takes ten seconds to load from twenty feet away, it may take thirty seconds from thirty feet, or just a few seconds from five feet.  This will depend a lot on your particular set up.  If the network you have set the chip to talk to isn’t available, as is the case when Mrs J is at the shelter, all will be taken care of when you are close enough.  Just turn the camera on and the uploading commences.

I bought one for myself:

I will note that the chip will work with a public hotspot, or it can be set up with your smart phone.  Lots of combinations available that aren’t (so far) interesting to me.  YMMV  Needless to say, there are several varieties of these, different capacities and features.  Check them out!