Eye-Fi vs PixelPipe iPhone Apps Reviewed

I was looking to find an iPhone app that would allow me to upload pictures automatically from my iPhone to my gallery on this site. So, with that said, I googled for a few to see what apps I could find that would allow me to do this. I came up with two (that interact/upload to Gallery2, the photo gallery software I use on this site). They are PixelPipe and Eye-Fi, both available in the Apple App Store for “free” (notice the free in quotes — I’ll get to that in just a few).

PixelPipe

Eye-Fi

So after finding the two, I downloaded them and installed both of them to my iPhone. Up first — Eye-Fi. I went to open it and it asked me for my username and password. Not having one, I returned to the Eye-Fi Website assuming I could register for one. Once there I found that in order to get an account, one must own one of Eye-Fi’s Secure Digital card products. So, in essence, this “free” application actually costs $49.99 (which is the cost of Eye-Fi’s lowest cost product).

With that said, I decided that Eye-Fi was no longer a viable option and that PixelPipe had won out over Eye-Fi.

Next up, PixelPipe. As PixelPipe states on their website:

Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text, photo, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 115 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and online storage around the globe. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their content and sharing their life.

So, with that said, I signed up for an account at http://www.pixelpipe.com. Once in, I created two “Pipes” — one for my Facebook account and another for Gallery2 on this site. I configured PixelPipe to use both as default destinations and set them to utilize custom folders instead of uploading to PixelPipe’s default (which is an album aptly named PixelPipe).

Now anytime I upload a picture from my iPhone using the PixelPipe app, it gets automatically uploaded to my “Mobile Uploads” folders on Facebook and Gallery2. How neat!

Note: I did have a little trouble in getting PixelPipe to upload to my Facebook Mobile Uploads folder. Even though I had defined it to do so on the “My Pipes” page on the PixelPipe website, a “PixelPipe Photos” album kept getting created and the photos were being uploaded to it. Facebook then wanted me to approve each and every photo that got uploaded to that folder before it would be posted to my Facebook account. This made no sense.

Anyway, the reason for this is that I had created my PixelPipe account some time ago and there was an older version of the “link” between Facebook and PixelPipe. I went into Settings > Application Settings on Facebook and deleted the old “link.” I then went into PixelPipe and deleted the Facebook pipe and recreated it. Once this was done I tried uploading via PixelPipe to Gallery2 and Facebook and guess what? It worked! My photo appeared in the “Mobile Uploads” folder on both sites. 🙂