Automatically View Your Photos on Your Computer
I’ve written about a really great gadget called Eye-fi, an SD memory card that wirelessly uploads photos taken in digital camera. You can read my review here.
Though this card is popularly used for uploading photos to a designated photo website, I use it primarily for nearly instant viewing of photos on my desktop or laptop computer. When Eye-fi uploads my images to my computer, I use a little application called Hazel which automatically opens up imported photos in my designated Eye-fi folder on my computer.
The rules for using Hazel in this regard are pretty simple.
1. Add the Eye-fi folder on your computer to the Hazel folder list. I have customized the icon for my Eye-fi folder, so yours might look generic.
Next, you’re going to create two rules for opening up and displaying your Eye-fi imported images. You can create another rule to empty your Eye-fi folder of images that have been in there for a day or two, or forever how along you want them to remain there until deleted.
2. Next, set up this rule for the Eye-fi folder. This rules says that every image that is added to the folder is to be opened using the Default Application (in this case Preview) and is to be revealed in the Finder.
Set up the Preview application to open all images in one window; that way when Eye-fi imports and opens up your photos you won’t have a lot of separate Preview windows opened in your Finder.
Also, what’s great about this method, you can view your photos in Preview before deciding to import them into a iPhoto or Aperture. You can of course set up Eye-fi to import your photos directly into iPhoto, but I prefer this method so that I’m not importing lots of photos that I will probably delete anyway.
3. Finally, you can create a second rule which deletes images from your Eye-fi folder after they have been there a couple of days. The two other items you see here in my screen shot refer to a couple of Apple Automator applications I use to send and tag my imported images to a designated Aperture project.
I can’t say how much this process is a huge time saver for me. Often times when I come back home from doing a shoot with with my Canon Powershot G9, I can turn the camera on downstairs and while I’m off doing something else, my images are being imported and displayed on my computer, waiting for me to process them. I don’t have to waste time with a wired configuration.
I can also use this process in a studio manner to view imported photos on the larger computer screen as they are shot. This is tethered shooting at its best.
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