Photo storage while travelling

At 07:14 -0800 on 9/2/06, Paul Atroshenko wrote:

When my daughter and her friend were in Thailand they would e-mail
their photos home from an internet cafe.

--
Alec McKenzie
alecmckenzie.me.uk

On Feb 9, 2006, at 9:14 AM, Paul Atroshenko wrote:
> Any other suggestions for a cheap and safe storage system for photos?
> Preferably, I would like a system which could show me that I have indeed
> safely transferred the pics before I wiped them from the camera's memory.

Are you taking your powerbook with you?

Hector I. Macedo

I'd check out the Internet cafes in Asia -- I've never been, but I
hear that they're everywhere. I'd take a USB card reader with me,
and take just the cards (I have three) and the reader with me to the
Cafe, and then download 'em to a CD and/or load them back to my home
PC/web page over the internet (I wouldn't take the camera to avoid
someone trying to snatch it). The cards & reader will easily fit
(and be concealed) in a front pants pocket.

The reason I say this is that a lot of times I've taken several
photos of the same thing to make sure I get a good shot, and then it
turns out that on the LCD screen of the camera (or the iPod) I'm
unable to see enough detail in the small screen to see that it's
slightly blurry -- something that even on an old CRT screen at an
Internet Cafe would be obvious (and thus be deleted to save room, or
re-shot).

Plus the CD will hold so much more information than the cards, and
there's little risk of someone stealing the CDs (as compared to a
camera or an iPod). I'd use the photo store as a backup/alternative
to the Internet Cafe idea, depending on cost vs. time -- after all,
you're there to experience Thailand, not sit in front of a computer
transferring pics ;-)

Matt

Paul, I've taken up bird photography and have the Canon 5D, which is full frame.  Packing all of your camera gear, memory cards, etc..and even maybe a computer can be an awesome task.  I recently went to Florida for 10 days for "birding" and other photography and took about 800 shots.  Now what?  In order to avoid flying with all of my camera/computer gear, I took the suggestions of others who shoot so much on trips.  I bought an Epson P-4000 Viewer.  Costs around $650(B&H Photo).  And allows you to "empty all of your CF cards into albums and will allow editing,  slide shows,(3.25" LCD) TV hook up etc. You then can re-use your memory cards and shoot away.  It holds 80 gig of picts.  And views both RAW and jpegs.  Although, for slide shows and rotations, it prefers Jpegs.  Works like a charm.  Hope this helps.  Then when you get home you can transfer onto your computer and finish your post-processing.  You can also put pictures from your computer onto the Viewer.  Hope this helps!

At 07:14 AM 02/09/2006 -0800, Paul Atroshenko wrote:
>Any other suggestions for a cheap and safe storage system for photos?

I recently read a thread on this topic at dpreviews.com:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1033&thread=16706093

There are now several devices whose only purpose is to store photos, and
many of them avoid the compromises involved in using an iPod for this
purpose. They are called Personal Storage Devices, which gives them the
unfortunately common acronym of PSD. Most use 2.5" hard disks, making them
a bit larger than an iPod but with a cheaper and more easily replaced disk.
Some of my other observations are in that thread.

I haven't taken this plunge yet, despite being dissatisfied with using the
iPod for this purpose. (The problem isn't the iPod but the limitations of
the camera interfaces available.) I bought another card, tripling the
memory I have available, and as a result no longer need extra storage for
weekend trips, and sadly can't plan any longer trips at the moment.

You don't say what format and resolution you are using for your photos, so
I don't know how much you'd be paying for more memory cards. Their price,
however, continues to drop. An advantage to multiple cards is that you
aren't putting all your eggs in one basket.

In fact, my mom is on her way home from Thailand as I write. With advice
and help from me and my sisters, she bought her first digital camera before
going -- and four 512MB SD cards. She almost fainted when we told her that
if she used "standard" quality, she'd have room for about 2500 photos. I
should soon hear how it turned out.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

At 07:14 -0800 02/09/2006, Paul Atroshenko wrote:
>The memory card in my camera will store 200 pics. I could buy a bigger card
>or buy an iPod with a photo adapter... or even go to a photo shop and have
>them transfer the photos onto a CD.

Although I have never done this, I believe your safest bet is to burn
2 CDs of your images periodically (whenever your memory card nears
capacity?). Keep one CD with you and mail the other one home or to a
friend. This way you'll have have one set of CD's with you and
another that will hopefully be waiting for you when you get home.

One friend has about a dozen cards that takes with him. Another
copies his images to his iPod and, on his last trip, proceeded to
leave the iPod on the plane.

Regardless of option you choose, you can't go wrong also buying
another, larger memory card. I've seen deals on 2GB CF cards around a
hundred dollars (US).

Sandro

My $0.02 is that while I cannot afford to lose any images, I am also not rabid enough to spend unnecessarily on computer gadgets.

The Epson viewer is a fine product if you don't mind dropping $600 on the latest or $400 for the previous model. The big selling point for me is the viewing screen and the fact it comes from a stable company and has a stable history. But, it's still a hard drive with a monitor, and hard drives eventually die.

That said, I don't want/need a viewer when I'm looking to back up files. It's a luxury I don't feel I need since I already have a laptop and other junk if I really want to view images while travelling.

So, plugging around the net at various sites like photo.net, I came across and decided on the Wolverine FlashPac 7000 Series of hard drive/card reader device. It's a no-frills, barebones display with multi-format card reader. Assuming it is reliable (and just buying from a big company doesn't exactly comfort me) it fits my requirements for being a) cheap and b) simple.

I got mine online at Costco.com for just over $200. Considering cards cost almost as much, I think this is an option worth exploring.

www.wolverinedata.com (This company's site doesn't exactly lend confidence, but heck, it's just a hard drive and card reader!)

Anyway, it has been working well so far and I'm pleased that for the money, I won't cry when/if it dies.

HTH, Larry

If you send them home via email, can you still edit, etc. once home by,
what, dragging the picts to IPhoto?


Jackie

Thanks for all your advice. I have also come across a few newish gadgets
which are apparently deisgned primarily for photo storage which I will
research further.

These are:

Smartdisk Fotochute 20 GB

Delkin USB Bridge

SmartDisk FlashTrax

Inoi 20 GB

Paul

At 08:03 -0800 on 13/2/06, JBD wrote:
>If you send them home via email, can you still edit, etc. once home by,
>what, dragging the picts to IPhoto?

The ones I have received by email come as attachments -- each photo
is stored as a separate image file, and you can then do whatever you
want with each one.

--
Alec McKenzie
alecmckenzie.me.uk

I solved my 'photo storage while travelling' problem by
buying a 1GB memory card for my camera. It was on special for just $140
(Aussie dollars). Together wiith my old 256 MB memory card, I can now take
more than 1000 pix. If I use up the memory card, it won't cost me much to
have the contents burnt onto a CD in a camera shop. These shops are just
about everywhere these days.

Paul

At 07:19 AM 02/10/2006 -0800, Matthew Clay Childress wrote:
>the CD will hold so much more information than the cards

Not really. A CD holds about 600-700MB. The best price point for SD cards
is now for 512MB cards, and will soon go up to 1GB. It'll probably be a few
years before DVD burners are common in Internet cafes.

CDs are also a very low density medium compared with other current
technologies. Their main advantage is that they are cheap.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

On a 5 week trip through Bhutan, Thailand and Laos this past Fall I took my Canon s400 and three 1 GB CF cards. Shooting at highest size and res, I was easily able to take 2000 pics plus assorted videos. There are also now abundant shops thoughout Thailand and Laos that will transfer your images from memory card to either cd or dvd for a few dollars while you wait.

Internet cafes abound in Thailand, though depending where you are the speeds can vary greatly. You probably wouldn't want to send a lot of time sending home many MB of jpeg files by email.

While there are a variety of hardware options to storing images on the go, I would go light weight and low tech while on the road.

Just as important, make sure you bring enough backup batteries and a charger. There is nothing worse than having your battery die just as have the perfect once in a lifetime shot :-(

Happy travels,

-Stephen

It's worth purchasing a plastic case in which to store your spare camera memory cards. I lost over two hundred photos of Vienna and Prague when my full card in my bellypack cracked.

Paul Brians Professor of English Director of Undergraduate Studies Department of English Washington State University Pullman, WA 99164-2050 http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/