One of the things that as a photographer who takes something like 3000 to 4000 pictures a year, and has photographed buildings, police, emergency response reactions to fire, arrests and other stuff has been the police cracking down under the idea that photographing a building is against the law.

I have always worried about losing pictures that have real commercial value, if not deeply personal value when I run around Seattle taking pictures of graphiti on the walls of buildings including the federal building downtown. A new product today (and I don’t have one, but am planning on getting one) has come out that is going to solve so many problems if the cops or anyone else tries to confiscate your SD card out of your camera..

The Eye-FI Pro SD card that will fit into my Nikon camera that if I am close enough to a WI-FI spot will upload the pictures as I take them to my smugmug account. With the numerous proven stories of the police harassing photographers, this is going to be an awesome tool for making sure the pictures you take you get to keep. Of course it has its downsides, if I can do this so can the bad guy but in the longer run, this is about taking pictures, and keeping them preserved regardless of what happens along the way.

Now it’s going one step further with the Eye-Fi Pro, aimed at professional photographers and enthusiasts. This new four-gigabyte card has support for a variety of files — RAW, JPEG and various video files — and well as other cool features. You can now geo-tag photos, or mark the exact location where they were taken. You can upload in a peer-to-peer fashion, meaning no wireless router is need to upload data to a computer. And you can gain easier access to Wi-Fi hot spots. Source: Venture Beat

I see this as one of the biggest boons to automated newsrooms that can take citizen photographs at their web sites. I see this as a huge boon for photographers who are worried about losing pictures because of one reason or another. I also see this as a way for photographers to be who we need to be when there is a fire, accident, or even just taking industrial landscape pictures. We put a lot of effort into our pictures, no matter how crappy they look, something like the Eye-Fi is going to help a lot of professional photographers keep their pictures in the face of adversity.

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