The traditional dedicated camera has one huge advantage over the smartphone you’re starting to use to take all your pictures. Its large lens captures a lot more light.
Refer to the Users Guide available at support.toshiba.com for your FlashAir card for complete instructions for installing the FlashAir utility and configuring your FlashAir card as well as additional information. The FlashAir utility is located in the FlashAir card by default along with the software for communicating wirelessly. NOTE: These steps are specific to my shooting setup (iMac, running OS X Sierra) but it may make things easier for someone else whose goal is the same. I have not yet tested the FlashAir on my PC workstation.: Toshiba FlashAir Tool (v3.0.2 for Mac) Needed for basic functionality of the card. Download FlashAir Photos for Windows 10 for Windows to preview and download photos directly from your digital camera to your phone via Wi-Fi with FlashAir card.
But your phone’s always with you. These days that camera you may have paid several hundred pounds for a few years ago is quite likely to be stuck in a drawer somewhere.
The handy, always-with-you aspect of smartphones isn’t their only advantage over traditional cameras. Crucially, your phone is wirelessly connectable to your LAN, and so to the computer you probably use for editing and collecting your masterworks.
Several of the newer dedicated cameras now include wireless connectivity (but at a price). And the chances are that camera you’ve stopped using doesn’t.
But that’s fixable. It’s what the Toshiba FlashAir Wireless SD card is for.
Just Add Wireless
Toshiba Flashair W-04 App
ALMOST ANY CAMERA THAT TAKES standard SD memory can be upgraded to wireless by sliding in a Toshiba FlashAir card. I tested the 16GB FlashAir card in a venerable Canon Powershot A640 and the pocketable Sony HX7V. The Sony camera is about seven years old, and the Canon, the last of the Powershots to run on standard AA batteries, dates back a full decade.
The FlashAir requires no set-up if you’re happy to accept its defaults—which include its SSID (service set identifier, the name it announces to wireless connecting devices) and its password (12345678). Toshiba (and common sense) recommends that you change these once you start using the FlashAir in earnest.
Taking power from your camera, the wireless circuitry built into the FlashAir advertises itself over the air with its SSID (something like “flashair-xxxxx”) inviting you to connect your WiFi notebook or phone.
When you’ve done this and supplied the WiFi password, the second piece of additional magic in the FlashAir card kicks in. As well as flash storage (obviously) and the wireless subsystem, the card also includes its own Web server. A wireless connected browser directed to the URL 192.168.0.1 then gets to see the card’s internal directory, and so has access to the data stored there.
That’s the basics of the FlashAir card: storage, WiFi, a Web server. You can get the card to do more or less everything you need on just this basis, with no additional software. And this is where I’d strongly recommend you kick off. It gives you a firm grasp of the fundamentals.
Which you’re going to need. Because if you start by following the steps laid out in the official manual you can end up very confused indeed.
As It Is Written
The first confusing thing about the manual is that—apart from the perfunctory combined Getting Started Guide and Warranty leaflet—there isn’t one. You have to fish about on the Web to find the associated software. Download this (I used the Mac version) and you’ll find it comprises a pair of apps. I’ll come to the FlashAir Drive app in a moment. The other app, FlashAir Tool, is the one with the embedded manual, accessed through its Help button.
That link to the associated software takes you to the latest versions of the two apps. Confusingly, there are other URLs to previous iterations of the apps that Toshiba has left on the Web for no very good reason (because the latest updates of the two apps will also work with previous hardware versions of the FlashAir card).
In order to run the FlashAir Tool app you’ll need to insert the card into an SD slot on your computer. Once that’s done, the first options on the FlashAir Tool menu are straightforward enough: change the SSID to the name of your choice, and set up a password instead of the default “12345678”. For the changes you make to stick you’re instructed to remove the card and plug it back in again. By doing this, you’re effectively applying the “I.T. Crowd” solution—switching it off and switching it on again.
This part of the menu is also where you can set up the “redirecting function“. According to the manual “The redirecting function automatically redirects the browser to “http://flashair” when accessing the FlashAir™ card with the browser…” This saves you having to type in the URL when accessing the card through a Web browser.
Staying in Touch with the World
The second section of the Network settings is where you’re invited to establish “Internet pass through mode“. Your direct WiFi connection to the FlashAir necessarily disconnects you from your regular wireless access point, so severing your connection to the Internet. To use Internet passthrough you give the FlashAir card the SSID and password for your wireless access point, which will enable it to relay Internet requests.
Nice idea. But whoever designed this seems not to have thought it through. You may not have this problem, but it happens that my own LAN is on the subnet 192.168.0.x, which is the same subnet that FlashAir uses. Worse, my Virgin Media router appears on the LAN as 192.168.0.1, which is the identical address used by the FlashAir Web server to deliver its internal directory.
Without Internet pass through mode enabled, with my laptop wirelessly connected to the FlashAir, the address 192.168.0.1 delivers the contents of the FlashAir with no problem. This is because although the FlashAir and my LAN have the same subnet address, I’m now completely disconnected from my LAN. But if I arrange for Internet pass through, while connected to the FlashAir that 192.1.68.0.1 address gets diverted from the FlashAir Web server, passing seamlessly through to my LAN and so to the Virgin Media Router. I never get to see the photos on the FlashAir card.
To make this work I’d need to change the address of the FlashAir card. But there’s no provision to do this. So I have to leave Internet pass through mode firmly switched off. (Ah, but see part 2)
Startup Mode
By default, in automatic startup mode the FlashAir card is set to power up its wireless the moment the camera is switched on. If no attempt is made to connect to the FlashAir after five minutes, the wireless powers down to save juice. If you want to switch the wireless on again you have to power-cycle the camera.
That five-minute timeout can be changed to between 1 minute and 30 minutes using the FlashAir Tool.
Toshiba Flashair Wifi Sd Card
Alternatively, the FlashAir Tool can set the card to manual startup mode. In this mode, when the camera is switched on the card behaves like an ordinary memory card. The wireless function remains off.
Toshiba’s cunning work-around is to include a dummy photo in directory separate from the real photos. Most camera menus will allow individual photos to be set to “protect”, which prevents them being accidentally deleted. In manual startup mode the FlashAir constantly polls the dummy photo to query its “protected” status.
Toshiba Flashair Appmode
The rules aren’t entirely straightforward. Regardless of whether protection of the dummy is on or off, when in manual startup mode, wireless won’t be turned on. Thereafter, turning protection off (or on and off if it’s already off) will switch the wireless on. Switching protection on (or off and on if it’s already on) turns the wireless off.
Recite that to yourself for a few weeks every bedtime and you’ll soon get the hang of it.
FlashAir Drive Setting
This feature is intended to show the content of the FlashAir card in a directory in your Finder (or for Windows users, File Explorer) as if the card were a shared network directory on your computer. It uses a standard Web protocol (WebDAV) that enables the tiny Web server inside the FlashAir to behave like network attached storage (NAS).
The FlashAir Drive app for the Mac and Windows is included in the download from the Toshiba Web site. You’ll first need to setup the FlashAir card with the FlashAir tool to use this feature. The app needs to know the SSID and wireless password you’ve set for the card
Although it sounds as if it might useful to have the contents of your camera appear as a drive on your PC or laptop, in practice this turns out to be awkward and not particularly reliable.
The wireless link is slow, so although the file names of the photos may be there in the directory, pulling up the photo itself will take a little time. There’s also a significant time lag between taking a new picture and its appearance on your computer. At the very least I found I had to manually refresh the WebDAV directory before any new photo turned up in it.
Warning: the FlashAir Drive app crashes unceremoniously if the parameters haven’t been correctly set up beforehand using the FlashAir Tool.
Toshiba’s FlashAir Drive solution is neat when it works, but isn’t something I felt able to rely on. The straightforward method we started with—manually switch the wireless connection and visit the default FlashAir URL in your browser—is much more solid.
But perhaps there’s a better way?
Ricoh to the Rescue (sort of)
Ricoh, which acquired and renamed EyeFi’s Cloud storage business and related applications in the summer of last year, fields a family of apps (across all the major operating systems) now called Keenai that will handle FlashAir as well as EyeFi. Ricoh seems to be using this to persuade you to enlist in its $50-per-year subscription plan. Not a bad price when you consider that members have the advantage of unlimited backup of all their photos of any resolution (including RAW).
Do you need to sign up to the subscription plan? Good question. See below.
You know up front that if you don’t stump up for the subscription after 30 days you’re going to lose all the photos and videos you’ve sent to the Cloud. Fair enough. The key question (for me, at least) is: will I still be able to use the Keenai app to transfer data locally?
I winged off this question to Keenai support, proceeding on the basis that the answer from any 21st-century company would be Yes.
I was astonished to receive this 1980s-style response:
Hmmmm…
There’s some undoubtedly good stuff in the Keenai app—for example, as the transfer from camera to computer is taking place a recognisable thumbnail of each shot appears on the Mac screen with a progress bar. Keenai will also run on your Android or iOS phone.
I started to write this all up at some length while I was waiting to hear back from Keenai Support Garry. But in the light of his very disappointing response, and to make room for other FlashAir techniques I’m actually going to use, I won’t include any of that here. If you want to plunge into Keenai’s subscription service, the Web can supply you with plenty of information about how it all works.
The Chrome(book) Solution
Yokin’s FlashAir Sync on the Asus C213NA Chromebook
A modest refinement of that basic Web browser solution we started with is a Chrome browser plug-in called Yokin’s FlashAirSync. This app works more-or-less wherever Chrome works (not phones, sadly, but it does, of course, includes Chromebooks), automating some of the basic process. You’ll still have to switch to the FlashAir wireless connection manually (at least, until we get to part 2 of this review). But having done that the contents of your camera turn up swiftly in the browser as thumbnails.
I used the Sony HX7V to take the photo on the right and watched each shot float effortlessly onto to the Asus C213NA’s screen within a matter of seconds.
You can set up in advance the directory on your computer you want to transfer pictures to and arrange for all the camera contents or only the newest to be sent there. You also get the option to download individual pictures. Unlike Keenai, there isn’t the luxury of seeing a thumbnail of your photo sliding in from the side of the screen, but the transfer is efficient and fast.
FlashAir Beyond the Mac
So far we’ve confined the discussion to wireless transfers from the camera to a computer. I’ve focused on the Mac, but everything we’ve talked about so far should work equally well on Windows machines. The base mechanism: storage, WiFi, Web server, is built around cross-platform standards and so will work practically anywhere.
Keenai is offered for the Mac and Windows and the open source repository Github offers Keenai solutions for Linux.
Android and iOS are also covered by Keenai and Toshiba’s own FlashAir app. I’ve spent no time on them here because transferring photos from camera to phone isn’t something I see much need to do, as the phone isn’t where I edit or store my media. But I’ve tested both the Toshiba and Keenai Android apps enough to know they work as well as those transfers to my Mac.
But I can envisage a situation where your editing computer might be Ethernet-wired into your LAN with no wireless facility. At first glance, it might seem the only way to handle this would be to use your phone as an intermediary. But hold on…
Beyond the Mac, beyond the desktop, beyond connection to phones and tablets, Yokin’s Chrome plug-in started me off in a whole new direction.
And this (as we’ll see in part 2) where the FlashAir story takes a whole new twist.
Chris Bidmead
The Wireless SD Card Market
Toshiba Flashair For Mac
The Toshiba FlashAir series of SD cards is now in its fourth generation. Originally launched in 2011 as the “World’s first SDHC memory card with embedded wireless LAN functionality to meet the SD Memory Card Standard”, it was, in fact, trailing in the wake of the pioneering manufacturer, EyeFi.
The EyeFi devices needed a special USB card reader and proprietary software. They arrived on the market in 2009 and were enthusiastically received by amateurs and professionals alike. Until, that is, a sudden announcement by EyeFi Inc. in the summer of 2016.
EyeFi shocked its users with the news that it was about to discontinue updates and Cloud support for all its previous wireless cards. By October of that year, customers were alarmed to discover that all EyeFi cards were being listed as “discontinued”.
Some of them may have taken comfort from the official EyeFi Inc. announcement that it had entered into a “technology sharing agreement” with Toshiba. But many felt that this had the distinct air of a sell-out to the larger Japanese competitor. A further complication was that EyeFi’s subscription Cloud service had passed into the hands of camera manufacturer Ricoh, who renamed the service Keenai.
EyeFi is still a presence on Amazon, although for some reason its cards are priced there at almost twice that of the Toshiba equivalents. EyeFi’s Web site has contracted down to a single page placeholder, and all the signs are that the brand is now little more than a name looking for a home.
There have been a few other manufacturers of similar products along the way. The two chief ones remaining in the market are Transcend (Taiwan) and ezShare (mainland China).
The latest versions of FlashPAP include a setup wizard to help you configure your FlashAir WiFi SD card. To access the wizard, click on the […] button located next to the FlashAir Host Name/IP field. A scanner is also included so that you can find the IP address of the card if for some reason you cannot access it with the Host Name. If using the IP address instead of the Host Name, it is recommended that you set up DHCP IP address reservation in your router in order to prevent the IP address from changing which can happen quite frequently unless DHCP reservation is used.
For manual configuration of the FlashAir WiFi SD card, keep reading this section.
The FlashAir can also be configured manually by either editing a CONFIG file located on the card itself or by sending it a command through a web browser. By default, the card is configured in AP (Access Point) mode, meaning that your card will broadcast itself as a network access point and you will need to connect your computer to this access point just like you would connect to your normal WiFi AP/network. As a result, while connected to the FlashAir, you would not be able to access the internet. Also, you would need to connect to the FlashAir “network” every time you wish to use it and then connect to your normal WiFi network when you are done. This is can be a hassle for obvious reasons.
Assuming you do in fact have a WiFi network at home, then the recommended method of using the FlashAir is to use it in station (STA) mode. In this mode, the card will connect to your WiFi network and you can access the card from a browser (or the FlashPAP program) on any computer that is connected to your home WiFi network – and all without ever having to forfeit the internet.
There are generally two ways to manually configure the card:
· By inserting it into your computer and editing the CONFIG file (Option 1 below)
· By sending a config command to it through a web browser (Option 2 below)
Please see this link for the official documentation on editing the CONFIG file:
https://flashair-developers.com/en/documents/api/config/
Please see this link for the official documentation on editing the configuration through your web browser:
https://flashair-developers.com/en/documents/api/configcgi/
Option 1: Editing the config file
The config file is located on the SD card in the folder /SD_WLAN and the filename is CONFIG with no extension (i.e. it is simply CONFIG and not CONFIG.txt for example). It is ordinarily a hidden file so in order to see and edit this on your computer you will need to make sure you have allowed hidden files and folders to be visible for your SD slot.
· Insert the FlashAir SD card into your computer.
· Browse to the SD_WLAN folder and open the CONFIG file with a basic text editor. If you do not see this folder or file, be sure that your OS settings are allowing hidden files to be seen. If you are certain the file does not exist, just copy the included sample CONFIG file to the SD_WLAN folder on your SD card then open it with any plain text editor to edit it.
· Edit the config file as based on the example below.
· Save the changes to the config file and remove the SD card from your computer.
· Place the card into your xPAP machine and wait several moments for the card to be read and the network portion of the card to be ready. If your machine rejects the card (insists on formatting it) then the problem could be that Windows has written some hidden files to the card. You may want to go back to the computer with it and delete any extra files that do not appear to belong on the card and try again.
· Confirm that it is working by opening your web browser and type the name of the card into the URL line. By default the name of the card is “flashair” (without the quotes). If you have changed the name using the APPNAME option in the config file, then use that name instead. So using the default name, you would simply enter flashair or http://flashair into your browser window and click Go.
· If you see a list of folders and files come up then you should be all ready to go! Just configure FlashPAP for your machine type and enter the correct Host Name such as flashair.
Example Config file for STATION mode. Where noted, you will need to provide your own information.
· APPSSID – Enter the SSID of your home WiFi network, that is, how it is listed amongst other WiFi networks in your area.
· APPNETWORKKEY – Enter the password used to connect to your WiFi network. After the SD card process the CONFIG file, it will change this key/password to XXXXXXXX for security reasons. Be sure to change it back to the correct password if you are making further changes to the CONFIG file.
· APPNAME – the default is flashair but you can change this if you’d like. This is the name you would type into a browser or the FlashPAP program in order to connect to it.
· MASTERCODE – Each FlashAir card comes with a default master code. You do not necessarily need to change this but if you intend to make changes to the configuration through a web browser rather than editing the config file directly, then you will need to know the master code. If you need to make one up, just use something like 01a23b45c67d89.
Example Config:
APPMODE=5
APPSSID=???
APPNETWORKKEY=???
APPNAME=???
DNSMODE=0
APPAUTOTIME=0
MASTERCODE=???
UPLOAD=1
Option 2: Sending a config command to the card through a web browser
By default the card ships in AP (Access Point) mode. You can change it to use STATION mode through a web browser but you would need to know the master code before you can do this. You can find the master code by first inserting the card into your computer then view the CONFIG file (/SD_WLAN/CONFIG). This folder and/or file has a “hidden” attribute so if you can’t find this file then be sure that your OS is allowing you to see hidden files and folders on the SD slot “drive”.
Note that while browsing the card through a web browser, you can NOT see or view the CONFIG file or any other hidden files. This is for security reasons and cannot be changed.
Once you know your master code, you can set the card to STATION mode by opening your web browser and “opening” the following URL:
http://flashair/config.cgi?MASTERCODE=0123456789&APPSSID=aaaaa&APPNETWORKKEY=bbbbb&APPMODE=5
Note the following:
· You cannot change the “name” of your card (in this case and by default, it is flashair) through a browser. You would need to change the config file directly if you wish to do that.
· The “flashair” part assumes you are using the default name of the card. You will need to change this part if you have changed the name of your card.
· 0123456789 – Replace this part with YOUR master code.
· aaaaa – Replace this part with the SSID of your home WiFi network.
· bbbbb – Replace this part with the password for your home WiFi network.
Once the command is executed through the browser it should report success. Wait a minute or so for the card to reboot itself and see if your changes have taken effect.