Eye-Fi has decided to discontinue the services that support their older X1 and X2 cards, which is a shame – they’re capable workhorse cards that can transfer photos directly to a smart phone using a private WiFi network or use their Eye-Fi Center to transfer photos to online services or your computer.

According to Eye-Fi, some features like direct mode may still work, but anything using their online service won’t work — if you haven’t created an account by September 16th 2016, you’re out of luck.

Eye-Fi stated in an email on June 20, 2016 stated that the company plans to continue maintaining and increasing the quality, support, and service that you have come to know from [the Eyefi] team.

An open letter to Eye-Fi on Hacker News sums up my complaints nicely. The change happened shortly after Ricoh acquired Eye-Fi, so claims that changing security protocols and compatibility with newer technologies sounds like an excuse.

I would have preferred a confirmation from Eye-Fi that local management of cards would still be possible. I’d like to know, for example, that I could “log on” locally to my card and change the Wi-Fi password or SSID and manage elements of my card that didn’t require their online services — or publish the means for people to write their own apps to manage the card locally if they didn’t want to support the cards past the EOL date.

It took a bit of work to get the latest Eye-Fi center to work with Windows 10, so I’m hoping it’ll limp along a little longer, until I buy a camera with built-in WiFi support or find another brand of WiFi SD card for my older cameras.