Travel & Image Storage

[bethappel]

I am going to Africa next year and have weight limitations for personal items. I'm planning on taking LOTS of photos and would like to be able to view them and then download to an external hard drive. I have a Focci external drive that I used to be able to view the pics as they downloaded, however, it's not working (very old) and I can't get any technical help from the mfg. or specialty repair places. Does anyone know of where a new one can be procured, or fixed?

Is there another solution to my problem that I'm just missing. The alternative is to buy a boatload of cards to take with me.

[johnrmoyer]

I have not used this for photos while traveling, so it might not be a good solution for you. I hope you have a good trip.

1. My cell phone has a Canon app that can access photos on my camera, so maybe it is possible to do this with a tablet that has a larger screen.

2. My cell phone is willing to access an external SSD drive using a USB C cable, so I speculate that other cell phones and tablets also might do this. I would expect a USB card reader to work the same. A card reader might be a good way to view photos on a phone or tablet. Some experimenting would be needed.

[rs-eos]

What camera do you have? If you have dual card slots, would be lighter to just load up on cards as you'd have an instant backup as you capture your images.

If you do plan to use a phone or tablet to offload images to, ensure that RAW images will be backed up as well.  I think some hardware/sofware may limit photo transfers to JPEG only.

[DeniroJason]

I had the same issue when I went to Los Altos Resort (LosAltosResort.com) and had to take a lot of photos at a wedding. If you're looking for an alternative to the Focci external drive, one option could be to purchase a laptop with a large hard drive. That way, you could view your photos and download them to the laptop's hard drive, and then you could transfer the images to your external hard drive when you return from your trip. Another solution could be purchasing a travel-size external hard drive that you can take with you and use while in Africa. That way, you don't have to worry about buying loads of memory cards, and you can back up your photos to the external hard drive as soon as you take them.

[jrhoffman75]

Do you have, or can you rent, an iPad?

depending on the storage size of the iPad you can store images on it. 

As a secondary backup you could use the iPad camera connection kit and a USB flash drive 

If the iPad storage is small you can us two flash drives. 

[shadowsports]

All have provided good advice.  Here's my method.

Multiple SD, CF Express cards.  A laptop, and external drive with adequate space to store photos.  DPP.

While I don't use DPP for post, its great on a travel laptop for trips. Ideally, you'll want your laptop and external to be large enough, so you have multiple copies of your images.  Always 2, 3 is better.  Alternative, you can use a combination of cards and a laptop, where the cards are one copy and you perform a transfer once a day, then the following day you use a new card.  This can be costly, so the laptop, external drive method is probably the most cost effective.   Take pictures and enjoy yourself during the day, cull and copy your keepers each night.  Hope you have a great trip.