Holiday photo storage ideas please.

The_blue · 19 Apr 2011 at 11:08

Morning all!

I'm off to Ecuador in 38 days, not that i'm counting!

I'm planning on taking as many pictures as possible during my stay in the Jungles and Cloud forests.

To store my pictures i'm thinking of taking a portable hard drive and transfering them as i get chance.

Has anyone done this before? I've used internet cafes and burned CD's before but i've also lost photos due to poor CDs

Also, I'm guessing internet cafes are full of virus ridden setups. I can clean the drive back home but would a virus harm any store photos?

I used to have a portable drive (Xdrive?) but it died

neil_g · 19 Apr 2011 at 11:17

buy a couple more memory cards would probably be the cheapest option?

sHo0sH · 19 Apr 2011 at 11:26

How about Dropbox? - www.dropbox.com

Dokinator · 19 Apr 2011 at 11:29

neil_g said:
buy a couple more memory cards would probably be the cheapest option?

Yeah I would recommend doing this, they are solid stated and more reliable than a hard drive unless you are thinking of taking an SSD.

Have a good time and keep us posted with the pictures

neil_g · 19 Apr 2011 at 11:57

sHo0sH said:
How about Dropbox? - www.dropbox.com

thing is, whats an average memory card these days 4gb? 8gb? i wouldnt like to waste a large portion of my holiday uploading that sort of data on whats probably going to be a low speed connection

the shadow · 19 Apr 2011 at 12:13

Netbook

funguST · 19 Apr 2011 at 12:15

neil_g said:
buy a couple more memory cards would probably be the cheapest option?

I'd also go with this, i am also off to Ecuador (although in 23 days) to make my way to Brazil, i am taking at least 1 4gig sdhc card per country with 1 or 2 spare.

bigredshark · 19 Apr 2011 at 14:06

Memory cards are the way to go, if you can keep them secure. One of the advantages of the higher end bodies is writing to two cards, one in your luggage and one in your cmaera bag when they're full protects against damage or theft. Pity so few camera's do it (Nikon are getting the message with the D300s and D7000 though).

You can get a lot of good cards for the cost of even the cheapest storage device and they'll be a lot more portable and resilient.

#Chri5# · 19 Apr 2011 at 14:25

Budget?

Epson (and others) make Multimedia Viewers which have an internal HD to copy SD/CF cards onto. Not cheap but gives you a self contained solution.

sHo0sH · 19 Apr 2011 at 14:26

Memory cards I guess then a couple of SDHC would do. Just try and be good at deleteing **** pictures whilst you are out there, as I can imagine it would be a mammoth task when you are back home to go through them all at once!

bigredshark · 19 Apr 2011 at 14:47

#Chri5# said:
Budget?

Epson (and others) make Multimedia Viewers which have an internal HD to copy SD/CF cards onto. Not cheap but gives you a self contained solution.

Indeed, but for the price of a Epson P7000 (lovely device that it is) you can buy 96GB of class 6 Sandisk 16GB SDHC cards....

...with a D7000 (for example) shooting lossless compressed 14 bit RAW, that's more than 5000 photos. In high quality jpeg it's something like 12,000...that's with a very high resolution camera too.

Those devices served a purpose once but today it's difficult to see the point unless you're away for an exceptionally long time...

binaryknight · 19 Apr 2011 at 15:04

way i did it was with a old laptop drive and a cheap usb enclosure from the bay, 40gig was more than enough for my needs. went to a net cafe when i felt i needed to empty my memory cards and transfered them to the hd.
wouldnt bother trying to upload them to via the net i found the speeds in the cafe's were no where near fast enough to ftp them to my site.

better options are listed above with my preference being either enough mem cards to cover you or a netbook

The_blue · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:15

Thanks guys!

Not got the space to carry my lappy and don't own a netbook.

I've got a 8 gig Kingston Elite Pro 133x and a 512meg early sandisk CF card at the moment.

Camera write speeds on both are fine but i'm guessing the read if full will take an age.

At about 10 meg a picture the 8 gig will hold 800 ish pics

I'm away 21 full days (24 with flights) If i take 100 pics a day i'll need space for 2100 or 21 gig! I'll do well over 100 a day i'd guess in the forest and jungle, less other days.

The_blue · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:17

Forgot to ask, bearing in mind these cards will be used once in a blue moon what brands would you recommend?

Raymond Lin · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:20

21gig is nothing, get 8G x 4 and you are set.

GSXRMovistar · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:22

Cheap secondhand netbook, looking around I reckon you could problably pick one up for £50-70.

Also if possible pick up a couple more smaller (say 4Gb cards), copy all images to the netbook and also use it to manage you memory cards (deleting non-keepers), if done correctly you should be able to capture everything and have the data in to places to reduce the risk of loss.

The_blue · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:24

Raymond Lin said:
21gig is nothing, get 8G x 4 and you are set.

True, Do you think it's enough?

Raymond Lin · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:25

The_blue said:
True, Do you think it's enough?

Well, depends how trigger happy you are.

The_blue · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:29

Took nearly 4k in india over 3 weeks

Culled to 800 keepers.

I need more!

The_blue · 19 Apr 2011 at 17:35

Just tried the 8 gig card and it took 10 mins to transfer 1.1 gig to my puter! Speedy!

Anyone tried the Hama Compact Flash cards? I can't see much info on them but they seem cheap and almost fast!