Twyste

Okay, so it isn’t exactly swimming, but it’s highly synchro and feels like some sort of fancy orchestration (without the music).  There was a recent post (linked here) that had a brilliant idea that you can take pictures with your big ol’ fancy pants camera and have them travel the airwaves to your computer and be stored in the cloud known as Dropbox.  All you need is:

1.  an Eye-Fi card for your camera (it’s just a memory card with fancy powers- available here: eye-fi card)

2.  a Dropbox account (see review here for iPad or here for iPhone, to understand what it is and why you want Dropbox anyway)

3.  a fancy camera (actually it works with most any camera that uses a memory card, but you might as well go fancy?)

That’s it.  Now, when I read that I could do this, I immediately thought, “I should do this,” then went to bed.  Today is a new day, though, and I’m getting it all set up and it’s really simple.  However, for someone less inclined to wildly push at buttons until they get the right result, I thought I would write out a little step by step tutorial for you.  Yep, I’m a giver.

Don’t be intimidated; there’s not really that much and you could have figured it out.  Step six is the part you want to pay attention to; the rest is just there to build your confidence and keep you on track.  So, here goes:

Step one:  Go online and see if there’s anywhere near you that you can buy an Eye-Fi card.  If not, go here (or somewhere else) and order one.

Step two:  Get a Dropbox account.  Go to http://dropbox.com and do what they say (they’re very nice and they explain it all with mostly small words).

Step three:  Get a fancy schmancy (or simply functioning) camera.

Step four:  Install the Eye-Fi card using provided instructions with card you ordered (or found if you live in a bigger town than me).  This is probably the hardest step, but it’s not that bad and you can do it.  Just breathe.

Step five:  Go to the Eye-Fi icon at top of your monitor (looks like a little Wi-Fi symbol) and click on it to reveal a drop-down menu.  Choose to open the Eye-Fi center.

Step six:  Underneath “DEVICES” on the left is a list, including “Eye-Fi Card;” click on the little settings icon (gear symbol) to the right of the eye-fi card.  This will give you a new menu with “photos” being one of the tabs at the top- click “photos.”  In the photos tab, there is a tab for “computer” and a tab for “online;” click the “computer” tab.  Go to where it says “manage” and be sure it says upload photos to “folder” not “iPhoto” (unless of course you want it to go to iPhoto).  Right below that box you can see the path to the folder where your pictures are going to end up.  This is where you will “change folder” (see that, just to the right?) to your Dropbox folder.  Make sure you click save.  That’s it.

Let me know if you have any questions or if it works beautifully (nice work).  What a cool feature!  Now we can see our pictures on all our devices that have Dropbox on them.