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This question was inspired by the recent question about Shooting Demonstrations and Political Events and the older How do you protect yourself at protests? question. It was originally posted as a comment.

Has anyone come across an approach for making wireless, real-time, remote backups of images? Perhaps something along the lines of using an Eye-Fi card to send pictures to a cellphone that uploads them to a website? Or really any method that could prevent loss of images in the case of deletion or damage to equipment.

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Sean
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    Just saw this: http://uk.gizmodo.com/5791249/eye+fi-mobile-x2-shoots-pics-straight-to-a-mobile-device and remembered this question: seems like the solution is one step nearer. – ElendilTheTall Apr 12 '11 at 16:53

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An Eye-Fi card in the camera coupled with a phone that can act as a wireless hotspot should do the trick. The Eye-Fi card will (based on your configuration) automatically upload the photos to a service of your choice such as Flickr, and the portable hotspot means that you'll have connectivity as long as you have cell coverage. For a hotspot there are several Android phones that offer the feature as well as the iPhone and standalone hotspots like the MiFi.

ahockley
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Well, Eye-Fi do a card for Apple users that automatically upload images to iPhoto via wi-fi, but that of course requires a wi-fi connection near the camera. There are also apps that automatically transfer photos from your iPhone to a nearby Mac. However, as yet there is nothing that unifies the process and takes images straight from your camera to Cloud-based storage. Time to fire up the iOS SDK!

ElendilTheTall
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  • I haven't played with my Eye-Fi in a while, but I seem to recall an option to upload images directly to Facebook or Flickr or other photo hosting sites. – Evan Krall Mar 25 '11 at 20:50
  • Yes, but that requires a Wi-fi connection - you'd need to herd any demos towards a Starbucks to make sure the shots were being backed up! – ElendilTheTall Mar 26 '11 at 14:05
  • That's what tethering via your cell phone or Mifi is for. – Evan Krall Mar 27 '11 at 04:01
  • True. Still, if the whole idea is to not get your equipment damaged, it seems stupid to have to bring along a laptop and risk that is well, not to mention the fact that most laptops are essentially off when they're closed. However, given the fact that most demos take place in large cities, and most large cities have fairly good public wifi 'cloud' access, doing it straight through a phone could be done. Just needs an app to do it. – ElendilTheTall Mar 27 '11 at 10:21
  • Why would you need a laptop? – Evan Krall Mar 28 '11 at 05:53
  • Say what? Most large cities in the United States do not have a good public wifi 'cloud'. The list here on Wikipedia is woefully short, doesn't contain many large cities, and more than few of the networks require payment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#United_States Definitely seems like an Eye-Fi + a tethered phone or MiFi is in order. Not sure why Elendil continues to talk about laptops. – Darryl Lee Jun 09 '11 at 08:40