Poll: USB from camera or external card reader?

[James J]

Just interested in seeing how OcUK forum users transfer their pictures to their computers for editing/archiving etc?

Choices are as follows! (I'll try and get a poll setup):

• Attach the camera to the computer via the provided USB cable and transfer files over
• Remove memory card from camera and put the files on the computer using an external card reader

I personally use the USB cable as my camera uses CF and my MBA has an inbuilt SD card slot. Never felt the need to get an external CF reader, which is why I'm interested in why people buy such devices! Perhaps I'm missing some sort of trick

 

[James J]

Can you transfer 8G in under 4 minutes?

Never timed it, yet I tend to start processing files as soon as the first one is transferring to the mac, so how fast the transfer actually is tends to be irrelevant for me anyway. Suppose the way you work when it comes to PP would also be a deciding factor to this.

 

[James J]

Yeah but how many photos do you try and transfer to your PC and how often? Its all fine and dandy talking about transferring 2000-3000 photos after you've shot a wedding and left numerous other shots from the week on other memory cards, but for day to day shooting and smaller jobs, none of that is required at all, nor necessary.

I've got a 16gb CF + 16gb SD card in my D300s atm and the max number of shots I've transferred to the PC in 1 go was just over 1000. It had finished transferring all of them into my aperture library before I'd got even a third of the way through the first cull of shots, so an external card reader still wouldn't have been beneficial to me even then.

 

[James J]

It saves time. That's all.

Hours, minutes or seconds.

For you, yes. For me, no. Unless you batch process files, it doesn't exactly save time anyway.