If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are 6,000 pictures worth?

Back when I was a toddler, taking pictures was expensive.  You had to buy film, and each roll only had about 32 exposures so you had to make each one count.  Plus, if you were taking pictures indoors or at night, you had to use a disposable flash bulb which was only good for one shot before it was thrown away.  And then on top of all that you had to pay to have your roll of film developed and printed.  This might explain why there are only a hundred or so pictures of me before the age of five. 

These days, of course, it costs nothing to take a picture.  You can snap away to your heart’s content on your digital camera without having to imagine a cash register “ka-ching” sound every time you take a picture.  Most memory cards have capacity for about 500 pictures, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space.  Integrated flashes last the lifetime of your camera.  And you can instantly preview each new picture on your camera, download them and view them on your PC screen, or share them with your friends and family over the Internet. 

However, even the best systems have their bottlenecks.  And for digital photography, the bottleneck is the clunky and cumbersome process of downloading your pictures from your camera to your PC.  You have to find the right cable, plug it in, launch your camera’s utility software, tell it which pictures to download and where to download them. 

And that’s where the Eye-Fi card comes in.  It’s a memory card for your digital camera that also has built-in wi-fi.  As soon as you take a picture, it automatically uploads wirelessly to your PC and to your choice of photo sharing web site. 

It makes taking pictures almost too easy.  And that’s probably why I have over 6,000 pictures of my 14 month old daughter.  That works out to approximately 14 pictures per day since she was born.  And every single one of them is priceless.