Traveling light on road trip, how to dump / transfer photos?

If you shoot RAW, you have very little option. Either bring your MBP or get an 11" MBA.

If you shoot JPEG, leave as much empty space as possible on your iPad mini, buy the SD card to Lightning adapter, and then you can import your pictures to your iPad. Since the storage is limited, I would then upload your pictures to a cloud storage (iCloud, dropbox, Picasa, Skydrive, anything) as much as you can, and then delete them from the iPad if more storage is needed. Repeat as necessary. The challenge is to find a wifi network to do the uploads.

In the end, it's almost impossible to be "PC-free" for this purpose. I tried a similar "post-PC" approach on a vacation one time with just my iPad, and it's very limiting.

All you need is Dropbox app for your iPad and also Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit then you are good to go.

Badrottie said:

All you need is Dropbox app for your iPad and also Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit then you are good to go.

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That is for the old 30-pin iPads. He/she would need the Lightning SD card adapter for the iPad mini.

If you can find a camera connection kit for your iPod classic you could copy your files to it. I don't know if it supports RAW-files.

Your other option is to dump photo's to an attached USB drive.

dmax35 said:

Your other option is to dump photo's to an attached USB drive.

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From an iPad? How? Jailbroken?

Along those lines, the iPod classic could be used as file storage, right?

notjustjay said:

From an iPad? How? Jailbroken?

Along those lines, the iPod classic could be used as file storage, right?

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Attach the USB drive to the camera.

dmax35 said:

Attach the USB drive to the camera.

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That's a feature on the Sony NEX, I imagine? I wish my Panasonic GF2 could do that.

There are some gadgets available for backing up your cards. I'm not sure any well known brands make them any more but Canon and Epsom used to. There are Chinese/Korean brands selling them on Amazon, Ebay etc. Basically a small hard drive with a little colour screen and card readers built in. Called things like:

Nexto DI
HyperDrive ColorSpace
Ex-Pro Picture 2

steveash said:

There are some gadgets available for backing up your cards. I'm not sure any well known brands make them any more but Canon and Epsom used to. There are Chinese/Korean brands selling them on Amazon, Ebay etc. Basically a small hard drive with a little colour screen and card readers built in. Called things like:

Nexto DI
HyperDrive ColorSpace
Ex-Pro Picture 2

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I have no personal experience with these HDDs with a memory card slot, but a friend of mine who travels and shoots extensively swears by them. He is often hiking into remote locations with several heavy camera systems (a film 6x17, and a digital Hassy with lenses, plus sometimes a Horseman). He has spent a long time figuring out how to lighten his pack - and card reading HDDs is one of those ways. Plus, he has multiple memory cards which he keeps the images on until he gets home.... so the HDD is actually the backup to the cards.

Have fun. There is a very nice brew pub with a good restaurant right on the beach at Cape Kiwanda. And by "on the beach" I mean the sand drifts into the pub ... There is a hotel literally across the road, so you can sample the beers (may I suggest the Porter?) and then toddle on home to your hotel room.

One of these devices:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Portable-Data-Storage/ci/3369/N/4083163867

Or get the smallest, cheapest netbook you can find and an external HD.

I bought a netbook last year which had a 250 gig hard drive, for under $200. I take it when I travel. It's a crappy little computer, sure, but it's cheap and fairly light and there's plenty of scratch space on that hard drive.

SamIchi said:

Hello all, I'm going on a road trip from LA to Seattle. I want to travel as light as possible. I have a 15"MBP but don't want to take it with me just because of the weight and size. I have an iPad mini 16gb, iPod classic 160gb, iPhone 4s 16gb. I plan on taking my Sony NEX with me but I don't know how I'll be able to dump my photos without my MBP. I have a 32GB SD but don't want to keep it just on that.

Anyone got suggestions with what I have? I don't plan on doing any heavy editing on the road.

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Personally, I use my iPad. Here's what I do when traveling.

1) Leave your MBP at home plugged in, with iPhoto or Aperture open and have Photostream set to automatic download.

2) Get a camera connection kit and load your photos for the day onto your iPad. Be sure to shoot RAW only. Photostream will sync RAW files, but only the JPEG from a JPEG+RAW file.

3) When you get back to the hotel connect to their Wifi and let the photos upload to Photostream. Once they've been uploaded double check that all of them made it to Photostream and you can then delete them from your iPad. You MBP at home will automatically download and file them in iPhoto or Aperture in their original RAW form.

I've used this method quite a few times and it works great! The only downside is you won't be able to edit the RAW files themselves. Instead, most apps will only grab the embedded JPEG preview, so you'll be limited to lower resolution photos if you want to share any photos while traveling. I'd test this workflow out yourself to make sure it does what you need it to do. I get that it might not be for everybody. Hope this helps!

SamIchi said:

I have a 32GB SD but don't want to keep it just on that.

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Honestly, the best solution, is just to keep your photos on the SD card. As long as it stays in your camera, the chances of you losing it or screwing it up are nil. Everytime you take that card out of your camera and/or plug it into something else, the chances of it getting damaged, corrupted, or lost, dramatically increase. Just keep it in the camera.

^This.
I recently traveled to North America for 4 weeks, and was in the same situation tying to work out the best way to dump pictures... iPad? external drive? etc...

I was trying to travel as light as possible so ended up just buying a stack of 32GB cards and a cheap card holder.
It obviously depends on your shooting but my dSLR filled roughly one card for the month.
You can always distribute your shots over multiple cards to minimise risk.

I looked at the SD card reading drives, using my iPad, but any more gadgets was just adding more risk of things being damaged, stolen or lost. But for peace of mind I could do online/local backups for the few shots I felt were special with my old laptop's limited drive space which I ended up deciding on taking.
The netbook idea some people are suggesting and kevinfulton.ca's here seem good too if you're just taking an iPad.

Either way there are risks, I found that the simple approach of keeping the pics on the cards worked well.

SamIchi said:

Thanks for the great ideas guys.

My brother just told me about the Eye-Fi card. Has anyone used this? Sounds like a good solution, but I'll have to research it a little more.

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I have one. It's neat, but you still need a laptop or iPad and it's not really any more efficient than popping the SD card out and putting into a USB reader. I'm not sure it will really solve any of the issues you describe in your first post. I'm not sure it would be useful for travel since you have to pre-setup the card to use each wifi network you want it to connect to (and you need a PC/Mac to run the software to do that).

I found the downside was that it considerably reduced my camera's battery life, and if you don't use it consistently then it starts to get confusing when you've imported some of your photos sometimes using the Eye-Fi wireless transfer and then you import them again later by regular means. Which photos went where?

Cheapie netbooks will certainly do the job, considering how cheap you can get them these days. However for travel I do swear by my ColorSpace UDMA which is not particularly expensive for the job it performs, nor is it overly large. I have used it extensively while travelling for both business and pleasure and it has saved my photos on more than one occasion.

To those who argue no backups are adequate, there can certainly be times where this is the case. But as soon as you have an incident which results in you original card getting lost/stolen/corrupted, you might think twice.

I use a NAS and the PhotoSync app. Easy to transfer via FTP.

I used to use the iPod camera connector to transfer raw and Jpeg images from my camera to my iPod. At some point Apple changed something and this is not now possible with certain generations of iPod so check out yours. If you can do this it is very simple to do but drains your camera battery during the transfer.

I now have an iPad and do this to my iPad and also I purchased a 1 year storage on iCloud so I transfer from camera to iPad and then to iCloud. As a further backup just buy a couple of cards so you do not have to reuse any.

I'm so used to having my laptop with me that I consider it part of my traveling light essentials. I can only think of a couple of trips in the last 20 years where I didn't have it with me. One of those was an Alaskan cruise this past summer. While I took a lot of pictures I never got close to filling my 16gb card and I had 2 4gb cards in reserve.

I worked with a guy whose wife was a wedding photographer. He was her assistant on weekends. To insure that they didn't lose pictures, they used Nikons with dual cf cards. At breaks, he would take the used cards, mark them, write protect them, and copy one onto the laptop in the van. She could continue shooting while this was going on. A little over the top for most people but they never lost a pix.

If I didn't want to take a laptop, I would use multiple SD cards with the iPad camera connection kit. When you have a decent Internet connection you can upload them to could storage.

Thanks all for the suggestions in this thread. I'm not the OP, but I am preparing for a cruise vacation in a few months and am reading the responses keenly.

I am acutely aware of the pain of losing vacation data, in my case it was back in the mid-90's when my family was all younger, and I lost a full camcorder tape filled with footage. I took the full tape out of the camera, set it down on a counter, popped in a new tape, and walked away... I still remember exactly where that happened in Bali, Indonesia. The footage on that tape was irreplacable -- in addition to the standard tourist stuff (which IS replacable) there were many shots of my now-grown relatives when they were kids, and of my late grandparents. I guess my only consolation is that once I realized what I had lost, I burned that footage into my mind replaying it in my head over and over again.

Anyway, I think my strategy will be: carry multiple smaller SD cards (4-16 gb each), don't reuse them when full, backup the cards to someone's computer, and upload to the cloud where free hotel wifi is available.

SamIchi said:

I tihnk that's what I will do too. I'm just about to purchase the Lightning to SD adapter for iPad. I'll probably get dropbox also.

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Check out the "Photosync" app, costs a couple of bucks but it makes pushing photos into the cloud a breeze.