On holiday’ memory card is full. Where download it’s content?

Would you be so kind to explain on how to download a 32Go memeory card to the cloud, in a few words?

Some options have already been mentioned in this thread. Of course it all depends on either having access to WiFi or cell phone service - which I imagine from the description of your travels might not be a given.

If you going places like that, why take DSLR at all, big camera will always make you target. Get Sony RX100/6, it is small, 24-200 zoom, and has WI-Fi, so you can upload your precious pics without cable and quality of files really good. Just get few spare batteries and fast memory card. 128Gb not that expensive.

Cubans could be friendly:)

I owe the rx100 3 fort Street photography

The portable hard drive idea is a good one. My variation on this is my ancient MacBook Air which has a SD reader. I uploaded them to the laptop. There used to be a attachment to the old iPads to upload images but it wasn't ideal because at the time iPads couldn't process raws.

 

Some cameras have apps that can grab pictures from the camera as well (Leica does). That too is an option and works by (I think) Bluetooth. Check to see if your camera has such an app.

 

Any MicroCenter or an equivalent store should have endless numbers of cards to buy. I'd do that AND upload images to a laptop or a external battery powered hard drive. Note some laptops don't have card readers so you might need a USB SD (or CF) card reader.

When you import photos into the Photos app on an iPad/iPhone/Mac, they automagically get uploaded to iCloud as long as you have space in your account.

 

I generally use iCloud in preference to other Cloud services because I like their pricing tiers a lot better. Dropbox gives you 2gb free(not much), while 2TB is paid and fairly expensive. I think iCloud works out to be more expensive than Dropbox by the time you get to 2TB, but the nice thing is it has several "steps" in-between to better match your needs. 99¢ gets you 50gb, $2.99 gets you 200gb(that's where I currently am) and $9.99 gets you 1TB.

 

I normally don't edit in-camera or take at anything less than max quality, but if you're concerned about cloud space it can be worth taking some time to do some basic culling. Skip the RAWs and even drop your JPEG quality if you're taking less important photos. Before downloading the card, flip through your photos on the camera and at least delete the obvious junk.

When you import photos into the Photos app on an iPad/iPhone/Mac, they automagically get uploaded to iCloud as long as you have space in your account.

 

I generally use iCloud in preference to other Cloud services because I like their pricing tiers a lot better. Dropbox gives you 2gb free(not much), while 2TB is paid and fairly expensive. I think iCloud works out to be more expensive than Dropbox by the time you get to 2TB, but the nice thing is it has several "steps" in-between to better match your needs. 99¢ gets you 50gb, $2.99 gets you 200gb(that's where I currently am) and $9.99 gets you 1TB.

 

I normally don't edit in-camera or take at anything less than max quality, but if you're concerned about cloud space it can be worth taking some time to do some basic culling. Skip the RAWs and even drop your JPEG quality if you're taking less important photos. Before downloading the card, flip through your photos on the camera and at least delete the obvious junk.

 

I delete the obvious junck every night, useless to carry junk around the next day.

 

I will have a close look into the cloud system and later on see whith the SD card reader in a external drive. I like that idea as well.

My solution to this problem last year was a lightweight inexpensive laptop and an extra hard drive. Extra cards also. I never carried all of it together and paid attention to my surroundings. I was in eastern Europe, a safer place than some you mentioned but anything can happen. In my research for this I found out that an I Pad is not the answer.

 

Rick H.

I had lunch here on the 2 tiny benches: rice with fresh spicy shrimps. The best I ever had, prepared with love by the mother. Paranoia?

Thank you again for your precious help.

I found this to be an interesting post and exchange of great ideas for anyone traveling with concerns over how best to make sure your images return with you. My response is to triple back up everything:

1. Use two card slots and duplicate the images while they are being taken. This means you need to bring lots of cards. I prefer cards that hold less rather than more to protect me if I have a card failure. Buy only quality brand name cards and format and reformat them only in your camera. Try not to reformat any of your cards if at all possible while on your trip.

2. Once taken take one of the cards and back it up to a portable hard drive like the Gnarbox shown above. (I have used similar backup devices on most of my international trips and they have saved me more than once.)

3. Take the same card and download the images to a small laptop with more than enough hard disk capacity for the whole trip. Make sure you bring two card readers with you with two different cables to protect you if one is lost or stolen or fails to work.

4. Once the download is completed, unplug the laptop from local power source. You do not want it plugged in if you get a power spike that can fry or disable your laptop.(This happened to me on one trip.) Here is a link to the one I use when I travel:

 

SurgePlus USB Swivel Charger (10 Watts, Combined)

 

5. Make sure when the laptop or any photo related device is plugged in it is protected with a device like a power strip with a surge protector.

6. Take the second image card and put it in a safe place, like a money belt or a passport holder.

7. When traveling, separate your image backups into separate pieces of carry on luggage. Laptop in one; portable hard drive in another; Cards in your pocket (or something similar.)

 

You can adjust the above to meet your travel conditions and paranoia. A laptop with its own external hard drive today may be a better use of money than a photo only portable hard drive. I am not familiar enough with Apple ipads or cloud services so I have not mentioned these.

I had lunch here on the 2 tiny benches: rice with fresh spicy shrimps. The best I ever had, prepared with love by the mother. Paranoia?

Thank you again for your precious help.

[ATTACH=full]1354045[/ATTACH]

You are welcome. If you visiting those tricky places for 45 years, I doubt anybody is qualified to give you advice on safety there. But for good measure you can google it.

With limited device memory, I'd try to set the camera to creating a new folder for every day. That way I might have a chance to copy such a folder on the device at once, without needing to preview images and from there (hopefully) onto another storage medium.

 

I've been reading about computerless portable HDDs with card readers for a while. To me their use case narrows down to (rather) unplugged vacations + "if things go smooth". - I occasionally had the issue that a card reader couldn't handle a card, that still worked fine inside my camera and appreciated the chance to plug that camera into a computer. With just a cards reading HDD I'd have no chance to copy images from that card.

 

Carrying an assortment of card readers cables and stuff to use with borrowed PCs on a trip comes to mind. - I am not sure if Internet cafes still exist and / or offer machinery suitable for your needs but they would be worth trying, if you are somewhat Windows savvy.

Would you be so kind to explain on how to download a 32Go memeory card to the cloud, in a few words? The clooud is new to me.

Cloud is "something at the other end of the Internet" the big problem about that: The Internet doesn't really exist to an extent that makes the cloud a real option for a photographer on the road. What I'd consider a "nice to have" Internet connection for a household (read: I am renting way less than that), seems to take up to 3 days to upload your 32GB card (according to download time calculators. <- Sorry, I don't know how to spot an English (or French) one). A hotel or public WIFI might share just that speed between all it's patrons so uploading your 32 GB card might take weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if it took an entire month via real world cell phone networks, coming along with a 64€ fee. <- Everything roughly guessed, assuming that you end somewhere with a few other folks, who share your needs & intentions.

 

I'd travel with an elderly netbook, that I bought used for 50€. While its USB2 connectors aren't fast, I could plug an external drive + 4 cards, from 3 cameras in at once and let it run overnight.

 

If time to upgrade your camera comes, get one with 2 card slots, record RAWs to both, maybe RAW +JPEG to the fast one and mail SD cards home.

 

Right now I could get a 128GB bread & butter Micro SD card + adapter for 20€ or a full size sluggish Sandisk for 23€. At those prices I recommend getting a few and sewing them into various "I won't wash this"-items before your next trip, just to make sure you won't run out of cardspace.

 

I'm no electronics geek. But I'd refrain from deleting in camera for 3 reasons:

1. Cards (at least the sluggish ones I'd use for travel photography) seem cheaper than getting your camera buttons replaced.
   
2. I follow those who advise to not mess with a card's content beyond needed, when you are worried if it will make it home at all.
    
   
3. with limited &/ unknown battery supplies* I'd rather shoot than chimp. - Batteries seem way heavier and also more expensive than cards, for the same amount of shots & AFAIK they'll let you fly with a full card but not with an empty battery.
   

With limited device memory, I'd try to set the camera to creating a new folder for every day. That way I might have a chance to copy such a folder on the device at once, without needing to preview images and from there (hopefully) onto another storage medium.

 

I've been reading about computerless portable HDDs with card readers for a while. To me their use case narrows down to (rather) unplugged vacations + "if things go smooth". - I occasionally had the issue that a card reader couldn't handle a card, that still worked fine inside my camera and appreciated the chance to plug that camera into a computer. With just a cards reading HDD I'd have no chance to copy images from that card.

 

Carrying an assortment of card readers cables and stuff to use with borrowed PCs on a trip comes to mind. - I am not sure if Internet cafes still exist and / or offer machinery suitable for your needs but they would be worth trying, if you are somewhat Windows savvy.

 

Cloud is "something at the other end of the Internet" the big problem about that: The Internet doesn't really exist to an extent that makes the cloud a real option for a photographer on the road. What I'd consider a "nice to have" Internet connection for a household (read: I am renting way less than that), seems to take up to 3 days to upload your 32GB card (according to download time calculators. <- Sorry, I don't know how to spot an English (or French) one). A hotel or public WIFI might share just that speed between all it's patrons so uploading your 32 GB card might take weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if it took an entire month via real world cell phone networks, coming along with a 64€ fee. <- Everything roughly guessed, assuming that you end somewhere with a few other folks, who share your needs & intentions.

 

I'd travel with an elderly netbook, that I bought used for 50€. While its USB2 connectors aren't fast, I could plug an external drive + 4 cards, from 3 cameras in at once and let it run overnight.

 

If time to upgrade your camera comes, get one with 2 card slots, record RAWs to both, maybe RAW +JPEG to the fast one and mail SD cards home.

 

Right now I could get a 128GB bread & butter Micro SD card + adapter for 20€ or a full size sluggish Sandisk for 23€. At those prices I recommend getting a few and sewing them into various "I won't wash this"-items before your next trip, just to make sure you won't run out of cardspace.

 

I'm no electronics geek. But I'd refrain from deleting in camera for 3 reasons:

1. Cards (at least the sluggish ones I'd use for travel photography) seem cheaper than getting your camera buttons replaced.
   
2. I follow those who advise to not mess with a card's content beyond needed, when you are worried if it will make it home at all.
    
   
3. with limited &/ unknown battery supplies* I'd rather shoot than chimp. - Batteries seem way heavier and also more expensive than cards, for the same amount of shots & AFAIK they'll let you fly with a full card but not with an empty battery.
   

Sie Stehen aber fruh auf Sonntags! Vielen Dank.

 

The internet cafés still exists but not in remote places in Africa. You will have to reach a big village to find 1 but then you get a very slow connection and quite some people waiting for their turn. In those remote places indeed an internet café is often a way to escape from boredom.

Holidays I take these days are specifically for photography in places I've never been before. Typically I shoot about 9000 images in the course of a week to 10 days. The best solution I've found is to carry enough memory cards that I don't have to format and reuse them during the trip. Ten 64G cards will hold about 15,000 24MP images. On my last trip, I carried 24 cards.

 

I find a laptop is an essential component of my travel gear. At one time, I would back up travel photos to Blu-Ray discs, which are inexpensive, compact, and can't be accidentally erased. One BD holds about 25 GB of data, which is less than the smallest practical card (32 GB). It would take me 3 hours to upload a 32G card at home, with high speed ethernet. Most internet service in hotels or B&B's would take 10 times as long. The best alternate solution in my kit is a portable 4T to 6T hard drive. Once home, I transfer the images to to two 24T RAID's, one a network drive.

The large array of possibilities is constantly changing, just to keep it all more interesting. A few years back I acquired a module from Kingston (the memory card folks) that is about the size of a deck of playing cards. It has a built-in rechargeable battery (it can also be used to recharge a cell phone) and a built-in WiFi hotspot. Using an app on my iPad (or iPhone) I can do transfers, either direction, between an SD card and a USB drive plugged into the module. That means (best I can tell) the memory in the phone or tablet doesn't have to be huge.

 

On a river cruise last year, each evening I would make two copies of the day's files to some 128G USB drives I brought along. Years back I used to do a new CF or SD card each day as suggested above, but with the ability to have three copies of each day's work, I just used a given SD card until it was full or nearly full.

 

My primary digi-thing was a Canon EOS M5 which using 24 Mpix raw files delivers a lot of data. It easily took an hour or more to save the files each day. If I tried to upload it somewhere with the WiFi hookup on the boat, I'd probably still be waiting for backup to complete. For really paranoiac situations in faraway places, I'm not sure how one might deal. Being meek and mild, I try to avoid being there! (Do satellite phones do data? -- of course, that's another attention getting hunk of expensive technology to be carting around. It would also need a $$$ service plan of some sort.)

I travel a lot. I have 7 primary storage cards for Mon to Sun. I change cards every day. At night I back them up to my Android tablet with a 256GB mSD card. I use an OTG USB adapter & small USB card reader. It's hard to do this with an Apple tablet. No internet needed. Easy.

If I loose the tablet I still have the files on the storage cards. But so far the tablet has not disappeared :) .

Travelling a lot I wonder on how to proceed to download a full memeory card because there is no possibility to buy another one hile being in a remote place and the end of the world?

Take more memory cards with you!

You can squeeze about a dozen memory cards into the same space as a cassette of 35mm film.

 

Any alternative, such as a laptop or card-reader enabled HDD, is going to take up more space and weight, as well as needing regular recharging.

If you can port the pics to your iPad, are you at a place where you can upload them to a cloud account for back-up? That in conjunction with extra cards should provide some security for you photographs. Then you can dump them off the iPad to make space for the next batch. You will have a copy on the cards and a copy on the cloud.

I didn't notice the OP date of this thread previously, but it looks as if Jean-Claude hasn't checked back here since last August.

Another zombie thread!

 

Still I hope Mr Watry is safe and well in whatever part of the world. And I wonder what use technologies such as ipads and cloud storage are in the remoter parts of '3rd world' countries? Since an ADSL connection takes at least 2 hours to upload just one gigabyte of data.