Photo management

[mskaufman]

I am not a semi professional photographer and take 300+ pictures a day when I travel. While looking a pictures is a highlight of getting home I try somethings to minimize my exposure to losing pictures.  I do not take a laptop but do load pictures onto a tablet so I have at least two copies of each image (one on the card and one on the tablet).  I leave the tablet set to load the images to the cloud when it encounters free Wifi.

[zackiedawg]

I strictly shoot with dedicated cameras, but whether I used cameras or a phone, I'd still keep my photos backed up as I like to have at least two copies around at all times in case something bad happened...lost phone (for those using phone), or lost memory cards/stolen camera/technical failure (for those using camera).

I always have a portable laptop or tablet with me to check e-mails and such while on cruises, so I have a harddrive with me...I use that.  Each day on the cruise, I upload the photos I took for the day onto the laptop, and leave them on the memory card.  I prefer to use multiple memory cards rather than one huge one, so if I'm on a longer cruise, I might come home with 2 full cards rather than just one.  The laptop serves only as an emergency backup in case anything happened to the memory card or camera.  When I get home, I load the photos off the cards to my computer, edit, sort, etc from there - and just delete the backup copies on the laptop as I didn't need them.  Always better safe than sorry!

[Heidi13]

Since we generally do longer cruises of 4+ months, I can take upwards of 15,000 and probably keep around half of them. Last World Cruise where we missed most ports, I kept about 3,000 photos.

 

Therefore I find a gaming laptop with 15" screen, fast processor/video card, photoshop elements and external drives are essential. Every day the cameras are uploaded to the laptop, with photos remaining on the cards until the photos are named and placed in my menu structure - year/WC/port. Once uploaded to an external drive, I will overwrite the card as required.

 

When time permits, I will do some photo-editing in PSE and ensure the results are saved on the laptop and uploaded to the external drive.

 

Waiting until I get home just isn't an option when you are gone for 4 to 6 months.

[getting older slowly]

On 2/25/2021 at 5:05 AM, Heidi13 said:

When time permits, I will do some photo-editing in PSE and ensure the results are saved on the laptop and uploaded to the external drive.

 

Waiting until I get home just isn't an option when you are gone for 4 to 6 months.

Heartily agree... when one is away for that length of time...

 

When we do road trip or long stays of over a week, I view and sort photos daily.... since often, with time permitting, will try different things, so like to see the results straight away......

 

Not like the old days  did a 3 1/2 week trip to the other side of country  with film  ( 14 rolls x 36 ) and waited until one got home before processing......

 

Don

[Paul S]

My wife and I both have a strong interest in photography and each of us carries quite a lot of gear, which means we  don't have spare allowance to take a laptop onto a plane as part of our hand luggage.

 

I have had a card fail on me during a trip, so that has made me very cautious. The current setup for backing up is a pair of wifi enabled 4Tb WD Wireless Pro portable drives with SD card slot, which we back up to alternatively on a daily basis and keep in the hotel or cabin safe unless in use or being charged. We can view, edit and delete the photos from our tablets via wifi.  Full cards are set aside and not cleared off during the trip. When we travel back the full cards are carried separately to the two hard drives. 

 

When we are back home I transfer photos from the cards to a dedicated drive on my desktop computer used for audiovisual files, labelled eg South America cruise 2019-02, and then loaded into Lightroom for processing. My wife does similarly on her desktop. I have two portable drives, each 4Tb, and back up my AV drive on the desktop alternately to each. LR backs up to a different drive from the one containing the catalogue. The most recent AV backup is kept in a safe and the older is kept separately elsewhere in the house. I should add that the desktop is located in a separate building at my home.

 

This should cover most bases.

[AryMay]

I am not a super techy person, but wanted some way to back up photos while we travel withOUT taking a laptop. My solution has been a RAVPower File Hub. (The one I have is an older model than the link I've provided.)

 

 

This thing is a wireless router that lets you transfer photos from either an SD card or an iPhone to an external hard drive without having an internet connection. 

 

Before a cruise, I set up daily folders on the external hard drive and then I try and dump all of the photos from my phone and a couple of different cameras each day. Sometimes I take a few of the better photos and transfer to my iPad so they are easy to show to traveling companions. I have also used the Power Hub to get copies of the photos that our friends have taken.

 

I take quite a few SD cards and switch them out most every day so that way I have both the cards and the external hard drive as backups. 

 

Once I get home then I sort through the photos and do any editing that is needed. The one thing that I have trouble with is not always having all of my devices set to the same time (or time zone) so that the photos don't end up totally in order by time of day. (FRUSTRATING!) 

[sjde]

That sounds like a great solution.

I wouldn’t care about time of day so much as day to day.