If photography is not the purpose of the trip, but you still use a stand-alone camera (not a smartphone) to take photos, what do you do? Do you always travel with a laptop and copy it every night? Or just keep them on SD cards till you get home?
I’m mainly asking because I just sold my laptop, and trying to decide between: getting an ultra-lightweight (<3lb ultrabook or 2-in-1) that I could take on every trip (including business trips, which means taking it in addition to my work laptop), or getting a larger laptop that I would only take on longer trips, or just getting a desktop. In any case I’d take a tablet on every trip, which is good enough for e-mail & browsing. Photo management is really the only thing I find tablets to be inadequate.
If I plan on working on our travelogue while we are on vacation, I bring my iPad (with an SD card reader) or my MacBook Pro. The MacBook is a much better tool, in that I can download and backup the images, as well as edit the photos and blog, but the iPad works OK. I don’t store the images on the iPad, I just keep them on the SD card, and use new cards as they fill up. The MacBook is not hugely heavier or bulkier than the iPad, so I bring it if at all possible.
I generally keep everything on the SD card (2 32G cards works fine) and bring my tablet if I want to post one or two shots from each day along the way. I try not to work too much on photos while on the trip, but it’s the first thing I do when I get back.
I leave them on the card until I get home, unless I am especially paranoid about losing them. If that is the case, I’ll copy them to my laptop, and still keep them on the card.
Only on my most recent trip did I ever come close to filling the card, and that was probably because I made some videos.
For the last trip that required more than around 100 photos, I copied them to my laptop when my camera was full, but I just happened to bring the laptop, it wasn’t for the express purpose of photo storage.
Now I have a camera with a 32G SD card, so I won’t need a backup unless I figure out how to take RAW images that my Windows 7 machine can open.
I just keep them on the SD cards. One 32 or 64 gig card will hold hundreds, if not thousands of photos.
I download them when I get home, and skip taking a laptop. If for some reason i’m particularly paranoid about the photos, I’ll swap out SD cards and keep the one I want to hang on to in my money belt with my passport.
I don’t bother with bringing a tablet/laptop. Not only is it a pain to bring, but I rarely find I have the time/interest to curate my photos while on vacation.
If I want to share something immediately to social media or via e-mail while on vacation, I pull out my iphone and snap a shot, but otherwise I wait until I have some time at home after the fact to get stuff out of my camera and into some kind of album.
When I’m on the road I take 2 DSLRs and a point-and-shoot with 32/16GB cards in them. I have a small work/travel laptop with Picasa and Photoshop Elements…every night I load the day’s photos onto the laptop, keeping the images on the SD cards. Depending on how industrious I am and how good the hotel wi-fi is I’ll edit and upload some stuff to my blog or google photos and maybe send a few emails out with images attached. At the end of the trip I load all the images into my home computer and to a couple of external hard drives.
I keep them all on the camera’s SD card and download them to my computer when I get home so I can process them and decide which ones to share.
I don’t post photos of my trip until I’m home; I don’t think it’s a good idea to announce online that I’m thousands of miles away from my house, although I like to leave the impression that I’m still traveling when the photos go up. My aunts and most of my friends on FB won’t know the difference.
I leave everything on the SD cards until I get home, but will carry multiple SD cards that I swap out during the trip so I don’t lose everything if I lose one. If I happen to be in a place with an internet cafe or hotel business centre where I can upload photos to my Google drive, I’ll do that as well for additional security.
100 photos? I usually take that many in 10 minutes if I’m at a scenic or interesting spot. (I take the shotgun approach to photography, with auto-bracketing enabled.)
Still, I think you all are starting to convince me that I don’t need to travel with a laptop all the time. I have a 128GB card and a couple of 64GB cards I could bring as spares.
I have a small MacBook that fits in my day pack. Every night I download that day’s photos onto the MacBook and identify each photo; otherwise I’ll forget what a lot of things are. I also keep everything on a 128GB card.
I use the “camera connection kit” from Apple, which doesn’t require any additional software.
For editing my Wordpress blog, I use BlogPad Pro and PressSync, as well as the Wordpress on-line editor.
Oh, definitely. There were plenty of times where I took several hundred photos in less than 2 weeks but still didn’t run out of space on my SD. Just that after I took the trip that finally maxed out my card, I took a couple other trips to visit family in which I happened to see stuff worth shooting (mainly interstate rest stops in the very early morning mist), and there were only 100 or so photos from those trips and I didn’t need to worry about a laptop.
My longest recent trip was for 6 weeks, to Kuala Lumpur, London, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel and Paris. I took about 4,700 photos on a DSLR, or about 100 each day on an average. (Some days were a lot more than that.) That number of pictures will fit on one 32 GB card, so you can rely on the card in the camera. However, I took a laptop with me, and copied the photos to the laptop each evening. That meant I could post a selection of the pictures onto Facebook as I went, as well as having the backup if I lost the camera or the card in the camera malfunctioned.
If you are at all serious about photography, RAW is a must. But I suppose that’s another topic.
With SD cards so (relatively) inexpensive these days, I just leave the (RAW) images on them. I also do not work on photos while away, so no laptop/tablet for me.
My camera allows for insertion of 2 cards with the option of automatically duplicating each image. While not foolproof, it is another level of protection against lost or corrupted files.
mmm
Huh? 128 gb micro sd cards are like $40. No reason at all not to get one of those, or two 64 gb cards and use the space.
Raw is drastically superior if you plan to do ANY kind of post-processing, as it’s nothing but the sensor information in a file format, with no additional processing or compression. That makes it a lot easier to adjust a bunch of parameters that you can’t really do once it’s compressed into a JPEG.
And with a 64 gb card, my DSLR (18 megapixels) still can take upward of a thousand pictures, even if I’m shooting BOTH raw and jpeg simultaneously, which is what I usually do.