How to archive digital photographs while travelling?

trap4

I have a friend who is shortly heading off on a mini round-the-world trip, lucky thing! She's planning on getting a new (her first) digital camera before going but her dilemma is this - she expects to take many hundreds of photos and doesn't know how she's going to 'store' them all. What are her options?

1) Buy a load of memory cards and pray she doesn't lose them or have them stolen?

2) Find web-cafes with (fingers crossed) card readers where she can archive them all to her GMail address?

3) Find photo kiosks where she can burn them to CD?

4) Any I'm missing?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions

JackKelly

You can buy portable hardrives made specificially for storing photos. Also, if she has an ipod, it can be used as a HD while travelling. Need some adapters and stuff, but it should work. Even with hundreds of photos though, two 1gb cards should hold everything, unless she is shooting in RAW or something.

JMcL

trap4 wrote:

I have a friend who is shortly heading off on a mini round-the-world trip, lucky thing! She's planning on getting a new (her first) digital camera before going but her dilemma is this - she expects to take many hundreds of photos and doesn't know how she's going to 'store' them all. What are her options?

1) Buy a load of memory cards and pray she doesn't lose them or have them stolen?

2) Find web-cafes with (fingers crossed) card readers where she can archive them all to her GMail address?

3) Find photo kiosks where she can burn them to CD?

4) Any I'm missing?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions

Buy a portable storage unit like this. There are loads of different models available, at lots of different prices. I have one of these (note you need to add a hard drive to this one), which is very basic (no LCD to view photos, a bit slow), but it's served me well.

John

rymus

I recently got a PD70X from the US and stuck a 60GB hard drive into it. It'll transfer around 50gb on a single charge of 4 AA batteries and it appears to be the fastest portable hard drive around so far. basic like the above with no way of viewing photos but that's a very small tradeoff for the kind of performance its capable of.

If I was heading away long-term theres no way I'd put any amount of faith in a hard drive based unit though. I'd take the unit of course but every few days I'd make sure I could backup the drive onto cd or dvd. I took mine to england recently where it got lots of use. Everything was spot on when I got home but I was still glad I did a dvd backup of the drive before I left england.

If theres going to be thousands upon thousands of photos I'd go for a portable hard drive but if were talking hundreds it might be less of a worry to stick with solid state stuff like compact flash cards (or whatever the camera uses obviously).

andy1249

For me , it has to be a small cheap laptop with a DVD burner , thats all I feel safe with , was on the amalfi coast once with a 300D , I was backing up to an emagic portable and the laptop , the emagic portable hard drive crashed , with about 400 photos of the coast on it , If i didn't have the laptop I would have cried , as it was , I had the laptop and all the burned DVD's , so there was no harm done.

waldo

There are a few risks involved with bringing laptops/external hard disks ect on a long trip. If you lose it (or the CDs you have made), all your photographs are gone forever.

I'd recommend purchasing a few more large memory cards from ebay, and when you are away send cd's home whenever you can. Get somebody in Ireland to open the cds and check that they are ok, and once you have verified that the photos are home safe, you can then delete the photos from your memory cards and start again. Obviously you can do this on a staggered basis (hence having a few cards) so you can keep shooting while you are waiting for the cds to arrive home.

Emailing them home isn't a very practical option: will take forever to upload (often not feasible at all), and is tedious to download them again when you get home.

alb

Most reliable and cheapest way is just to burn CDs/DVDs in net cafes. Burn everything twice and mail one copy home to cover **** ups. Unless you're taking an insane amount of photos this will wokr out cheaper than even the cheapest hard drive solution

rabbitinlights

Put them onto CD's, Ive mates who are away at the moment (Africa - Aisa - Australia) and they said even in the most off the beaten track places have cafe's that put them onto CD for a € or 2. 99% of travellers have a digital camera, so the demand is there for these places. I wouldnt bother with a HDD, too much hassle and your putting all your eggs in one basket. They get 2 copies of each CD and when they have a few, they post one copy home just to be safe. Obviously haveing a 1GB card cuts down on the amount of CD's you send home.

S.

<edit> Great minds think alike!<edit>

trap4

Wow, thanks for all the terrific replies. You've certainly given us plenty of food for thought. I never realised there were so many options and gizmos available.

Shrimp

Just get the mem cards and dont loose them, not a hard thing to do really.