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

[SamIchi]

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.

[pika2000]

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.

[Badrottie]

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

[pika2000]

Originally Posted by Badrottie

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

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

[teleromeo]

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.

[dmax35]

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

[notjustjay]

Originally Posted by dmax35

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

From an iPad? How? Jailbroken?

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

[kevinfulton.ca]

Originally Posted by SamIchi

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.

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!

[VirtualRain]

Originally Posted by SamIchi

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

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.

[TheReef]

^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]

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.

[notjustjay]

Originally Posted by SamIchi

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.

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?

[tri-x]

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.

[-hh]

Originally Posted by mikepro

One of these devices:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Po...9/N/4083163867

This is the same solution that I bought back in 2005 .. a pair (yes, for redundency) of Sanho Hyperdrive HD80's. At the time, they cost around $250each for 40GB of backup storage capacity. I've modernized them once, to use 120GB internal PATA 2.5"HDDs. The stuff they're selling today is probably better several ways.

Originally Posted by VirtualRain

Honestly, the best solution, is just to keep your photos on the SD card...

...and if you think that 32GB isn't enough, just buy some more memory cards - by today's standards, they're reasonably affordable and they're small ... even CF sized cards:




..that's 200GB, which IIRC is around 4500 images on a Canon 7D (RAW+JPEG).


-hh