Old low-end Eye-Fi card + camera + iPad + iPhoto = Photo fun

I have an old(ish) Eye-Fi Home Video 4GB SDHC card that I got as part of a promotion to buy 200GB of Google Docs storage space in 2010. At the time, the transfer was through my Mac (or PC) to Eye-Fi’s service and then to Google Picasa. The process was slow and, it seemed, not 100% reliable. So, the card got put away after a week or two of disappointing tests.

However, Apple’s new iPhoto for iOS (released last week) is such an amazing tool on my iPad (it also works on an iPhone or iPod touch) that I wanted to get photos from a digital camera to my iPad without using SD card readers. My guess was that Eye-Fi’s free iOS app would not work with my old low-end card (the model is not even listed on Eye-Fi’s web site). However, to my surprise it worked fine after following the simple instructions provided by the app itself.

This means I can get high resolution photos from a conventional digital camera to my iPad and into iPhoto without using SD card adapters.