Using Eye-Fi Card on Linux

Productivity Sauce

The Eye-Fi card is a nifty solution for adding wireless capabilities to virtually any digital camera, but it does have one serious drawback: the card relies on proprietary software that runs only on Windows and Mac OS X. Fortunately, the standalone Eye-Fi server written in Python will happily run on Linux, courtesy of the enterprising hacker Jeff Tchang. Better yet, the server is extremely easy to configure and run. You do need to have access to a Windows or Mac OS X machine to initialize your Eye-Fi card, though. This must be done in order to obtain the upload key required for the Eye-Fi server to function properly. On a Windows machine, install the Eye-Fi manager software and use it to configure your Eye-Fi card. Once you've done that, open the Settings.xml file (on Windows XP, it's located in the C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Eye-Fi directory) and note the UploadKey value.

Next, grab the latest version of the Eye-Fi server, unpack all files into a directory (/home/user/eyefiserver). Open then the DefaultSettings.ini file and replace the default UploadKey value with your own. Uncomment then the line that starts with DownloadLocation and specify the path to the directory where you want the server to download photos, for example:

DownloadLocation=/home/user/Photos

Save the file and your server is ready to go. In the terminal, switch to the eyefiserver directory and execute the following command:

python EyeFiServer.py -c DefaultSettings.ini

That's it. Fire up your camera, take a few shots, and the photos magically appear in the specified directory on your Linux machine.

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