Managing digital photos on the road - updates?

[AnderZen]

Originally posted by David & Cheryl Laing:
Not just in Europe but I would stick my neck out and say most of the world has there facitities available. There has been nowhere where we were not able to view our digital pics or get the cards transferred to CD's. In Asia it was so cheap we often got lots of copies to send to different members of our family. Even in places like northern Laos it is easy to get computor services. The shops may just look a little different to what you are used to....but then once you are on the road your vision of 'normal' changes a lot as well.

Really - I suspect (hope) this goes for the major cities only? When I was last in SE asia a few years ago only Cities like Vientienne, Bangkok, Chang Mai where able to do this, but things change rapidly.

I use an Xs-drive - a portable 30 GB harddrive with build in card reader. Used it on my last 6-7 journeys and It never failed me. Hovever for a longer journey I would combine this with burning DVD/CD and mailing them home.

[Grant and Jules]

We have found that it is easy enough to download photos to CD at internet cafes. We have a 1 gig card and a 64mg card and a little storage in the camera. We had over 700 photos on the 1 gig card and it was not full up!

So far we have been in Canada, USA, Mexico, Belize and Guatemala - on the road for 8 months and we have had no difficulties finding cafes that have equipment to do this.

We then send the discs home by mail. No problems so far.

[excelsior415]

Newegg carries a portable 2.5" hdd enclosure that accepts memory cards. I just built one with a 40gb for $100 last week. One touch download and clear of your card as well. Pretty slick and ipod sized.
Jeff
newbie

[Mombassa]

I just upgraded my camera and it came with a 2GB SD card. An additional $20 gets you a USB card reader, thumb drive size. The 2GB card holds 775 pictures at highest resolution and size. You can get cheap webhosting at goddady.com, something like $6 for 50 GB. Use Internet Explorer to ftp things up there till you get home and have time to sort it out. That's the "bare-bones" approach. A bit more work gets you a CD burned etc. Easy enough these days. I'm leaving in 6 days for an RTW and I'm taking a laptop as well. Maybe if I would have known how easy things have gotten as of late, I might not have bothered.

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Kevin

http://www.nohorizons.net

[Redboots]

This might be a handy little gizmo for some people

http://www.engadget.com/2005/01/06/s...n-usb-adapter/

[mj]

First of all, I wouldn't trust CD-Rs or -RWs when carrying them with you on your trip. CD-Rs and -RWs are very vulnerable to both very high and very low temperatures, therefore, your burned CDs might turn out to be worthless once you've arrived back home.
I would also never trust a harddrive device as only source for backing up my files. The reason is quite simple: Harddrives tend to fail at the worst possible moment, mostly due to vibrations. I've had two harddrives fail me already on a trip therefore I don't trust them anymore. That includes MP3 players like the iPod as well.

The only reliable medium for backups I found was flash memory, either a flash MP3-Player (like the iPod Mini with 4 gig flash memory) or USB sticks (you can get a 1 gig USB-stick dirt cheap these days, I even saw an ad for a 6GB USB-stick for less than 100 bucks couple of days ago) or a lot of flash memory cards (CF of course). If you also bring a tiny USB card reader along you should have no trouble whatsoever accessing your photos whatever device they're saved on. Of course burning your pics on CD-Rs and snail mailing them back home is a backup possibility which can and should be combined with other backup techniques

[Ian Bradshaw]

Some professional digital SLRs allow simultaneous recording to 2 card slots for situations where a backup of pictures is essential. There is no quicker or simpler way to make a backup copy of digital photos than have it done in the camera itself when you press the shutter release. Unfortunately the cameras that have this facility (such as the Canon EOS-1D range) are prohibitively expensive to be justified by this feature alone. However, if photography is your reason for travelling, then maybe you'd be happy to spend as much on your camera as your bike.... but then if you're that serious, you'd probably still want to review pictures on a PC/Mac & then backup to optical media or do internet file transfers of important pictures too :-)

[MarkLG]

A few years ago when a 1GB memory card cost £200 this was a real problem. Memory cards are so cheap these days that if I was away for a long period of time I'd just stock up on cards. You can get a 2GB card for £20 on ebay which will be hold over 500 photos from a 6MP camera. Take 2 or 3 of these, and if you do find yourself running low on space then stop off in an internet cafe and get the photos transfered to CD or DVD. Get 2 copies of the discs and post one home.
On my last trip I only had a 1GB card in the camera, and had to get it transfered to disc - it only cost about £3 to get the guy in the internet cafe to make up the disc for me.
It also pays to be more thoughtful in your picture taking. Stop and think about what you want to achieve in the photo before you hit the button. It's better to have one or two well framed shots than a dozen blured or poorly composed shots. Do you really want to sort through 1000's of so-so photos when you get back home, or would you rather have a few 100 really good ones?

[Jethro]

Just been looking at one of these
http://www.shiroi.co.uk/belkin-belki...scription.html
Looks small enough and should allow you to dump a cameras contents onto a memory stick. Or I'd imagine if you have 2 cameras you could copy a full memory card onto an empty card in the other.
Keep one card with you and post the copied card/memory stich home.

cheers

Stewart

[Ian Bradshaw]

For me that looks really useful to back my photos up to a 2.5" portable hard drive. I'll need mains/vehicle power to power either the hard drive or the USB copier as I think it's unlikely that 3xAA batteries will provide enough energy to run even a small hard drive for long enough.

Note that some camera manufacturers (notably Canon & Kodak) have not designed their cameras' USB interfaces to look like a hard drive (they do not support 'USB mass storage device'), so plugging one of these cameras into most USB copiers will not work. You will need to use a USB card reader plugged into the copier to read the photos from the card.

There are other makes about, but this one seems to be the smallest/cheapest at the moment.

I found some user reviews here:
dabs.com - Belkin USB Anywhere USB data copier (F5U203UK)

It's also available from Amazon & others.

Ian

[Alexlebrit]

Seems that most cameras now take SD cards, you can buy them cheap up to 2gig, and you can get cheap USB card readers for them. I bought a 1gig SD card and USB reader set for €20 the other day. You simply plug it in a PC and it reads as another drive.

Also ask yourself where you want to show your pictures? Are they just for the internet or will you be printing them out? If you're printing, what size, normal photo, or huge poster size? If all you're going to be doing is showing them on the web, why set your camera to largest size, highest definition, it'll just mean a slow up/download speed. I'm actually planning on taking two cameras, one for happy snaps and one for more serious photos. You can get a 3mp camera now very cheap which is fine for website shots.

Also why bother paying for photohosting? If you check out Kodak/Fuji etc all of them offer free hosting for photos as part of their online printing services, and it means your friends relatives can order up properly printed on photopaper pics if the'd like.

[kyte]

hi there...

I installed event photography software in my Digital SLR camera which uploads the photographs click by the camera to the data center.. and help me in arranging and selecting the photographs clicked by me.