Eye-Fi seem to have solved a user interface problem without a user interface. Previously, every image you take would be uploaded by the Eye-Fi card—or you could race to delete a bad image before the upload started. For me, that’s around 3 or 4 out of 5 images, and a very frustrating experience.
This is a real challenge for Eye-Fi because the product lives inside another product, and they have essentially zero user interface—no way to communicate with the user of the card.
The new Selective Upload mode only uploads images that you mark with the Protect mode of your camera—that’s overloading an existing bit of UI in most cameras to do solve another problem. Pretty clever, I think.
Protect Mode on my Canon SD790 IS is a little cumbersome, compared to the Erase feature. Where Erase is a quick option in playback, Protect Mode is a separate browsing option from the top level menu. But at least it gives you the option of protecting a whole batch by date & time, so it could net less fidgeting with the camera controls.
Now you can choose between too much uploading and too little—the obvious failure mode with Selected Upload will be “I took all those pictures but forgot to mark them for upload, so they’re still on my camera.”
Added: Most of the time I set my uploads to private on Flickr, so that I can explicitly approve images before they’re made public. Upload Selected makes it possible to do that editing in the camera. This could improve the workflow in many situations, like shooting live at an event.
