Want to upload photos to your Windows Live Space without ever plugging in your Camera? do it with eye.fi

What is Eye-Fi?

The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless memory card. It automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.

No cables, no waiting, no hassles.

What have we done?

I've been working with the awesome team at Eye-Fi (and others from Windows Live - shout out to JP Wollersheim, Federico Raggi & YuanYuan Yu) to enable user's photos to be seamlessly transferred from their camera into their Windows Live Space. We weren't the first to the party here as our Photo API only came out in November, but it is awesome that any of our 100 million+ Windows Live Spaces users could use this Eye-Fi service.

Why would I publish to Spaces and not some other service?

Other people (not me, I'm a super extravert) may only want to share their photos with friends and family (i.e. the people on your Windows Live Messenger Buddy List). Using Windows Live Spaces it is really easy to setup those permissions. That way you get the flexibility of instantly sharing your pictures, but knowing they are secure. You can also store lots more information in your Windows Live Space which you can securely share with your friends & family, so it is more than just a photo sharing site.

How did they do it?

Eye-Fi used the Windows Live Spaces Photo API which allows users to delegate permission for Eye-Fi to Create/Read/Update/Delete Photos & Albums in their Windows Live Space. Delegation is important (as I mentioned in this Wired article with my new promotion) because users should never share their Windows Live ID credentials (username & password). The end user is also in control of their information as they can revoke permissions, so any web site they have granted access to will need to re-request.

So what does this look like - Granting Permission?

Firstly, you need to go and buy an Eye-Fi card, then you can open the Eye-Fi management website. From this website you configure your card to use one or more wireless access points.

You can also select the online service where the photos can get uploaded to. I have a facebook, flickr and Windows Live Spaces account. When I select Add another photo service I can choose Windows Live from the list of services (there are lots of other services ~ 20).

I review the details of the specific online service and then select to connect card to Windows Live Spaces.

If I'm not already sign in somewhere else using Windows Live ID (could be any web site in the same browser session which uses Windows Live ID as the authentication system), I need to sign in.

When I'm authenticated I read the disclaimers, verify Eye.Fi's privacy statement and then delegate permissions.

Then I'm returned to the Eye.Fi website (technically a DomainAuthenticationToken was POSTED back to them which they have persisted against my account)

I can now see my Windows Live Spaces account there, and if I wanted to switch back to Facebook for FLICKR I could easily do that too.

There are also other settings you can manage within the Eye.Fi site.

This is about Photos - show me the photos?

Now we've granted permission for Eye.Fi to Create/Read/Update/Delete on the Photos in your Windows Live Spaces Photo store you can start snapping away with your camera.

You put the Eye-Fi SD card (one card has 2GB Storage and a WiFi network adapter) in your camera, and take lots of photos.

When there are photos on the card, and the card is powered up, it will look for a network connection and then upload your pictures.

During taking these screenshots I had the Eye.Fi manager website open, which shows me the status of my uploads.

IMPORTANT: I may have my computer turned off and the images will still be uploaded to the Eye.Fi service and then automatically to Windows Live Spaces (or another online service)

The web site is very smart, it shows how much of the images have been uploaded, if they were interrupted, and also links to the image in Windows Live Spaces post upload.

I can see there is a new album created Taken on December 29th, 2007 in my Windows Live Space.

When I drill into that I see all the images which are uploaded.

This is cool but I also collect my images on my PC - I don't just want them on the net.

Eye.Fi has a piece of software which runs on your desktop called the Eye-Fi Manager. The manager software is installed when you first connect the SD Card to your PC (installer is on the card, or you can download it from the web).

The manager does things like detects the card for configuration, but its most important task is downloading images from the Eye.Fi server back down to your desktop.

When a new image is ready for download it pops a toast (like an IM message) and shows you the thumbnail and the progress of the download (note: you can configure the manager software to not display this toast).

I can then browse to my photos (My Computer, Pictures)

and there is a folder called Eye-Fi which my albums are downloaded to.

Lastly to manage all of my photos on my Windows PC I can use Windows Live Photo Gallery - that is how I create all these great Panoramic Photographs (how to).

I want to work with user's photos in my application - gimme gimme!

This wasn't a custom thing we did for Eye.Fi - anyone can do it (not sure if anyone else has killer hardware & services like this) but you can easily & securely integrate user's photos into your application by using the Windows Live Spaces Photo API & Windows Live Spaces Photo Control.

UPDATE: MoneyCentral have reported on this