Traveling and storing digital pictures
If you go travel for any serious amount of time, and take a lot of digital pictures, you need to figure out a way to store all that goodness. Uploading to a site is not a practical option (too much data, and you don’t want to spend your days sitting in an internet cafe waiting for the upload to finish). You basically have 3 options: a portable harddrive, a portable CD burner, or buying lots of memory cards.
When I went for two weeks to Colombia, I took my 256M memory card, and that was fine. I put the settings to make medium size pictures, and didn’t make too many movies. This time I’m planning on spending 6 weeks in India, so I need another solution. I want to feel as if I can take as many pictures and movies a day as I like. Memory cards do drop in price - a 256M SD card is now less than US$50 - but the approach doesn’t scale if you plan to travel a lot.
This Thorntree thread discusses most options. DPReview.com has a list of options.
Portable CD recorders.
Many of these double as DVD players and such, but I’m not interested in those features. The biggest problem seems to be availability in the US.
The Nixvue Vizor (straight out of Startrek) looks, um, interesting, but doesn’t seem to be for sale anywhere.
(Yes, they’re bulky, these portable CD burners. But less bulky than, say, a guidebook.)
The EZDigiMagic is for sale for US$300 but out of stock, oh wait, seems to be available for US$259. Gets good reviews (scroll down). Seems like a decent option.
The most recommended portable CD writer seems to be the JOBO CP 200 Apacer Disc Steno, currentl at US$250. Here’s a good, real life traveling review. The writer recommends having 2 storage options while travelling (not a bad idea but expensive) - he carried a CD burner AND a portable harddrive.
The Carry Fotobar stands out because it burns to DVD as well as to CD, but again, seems hard to find in the US. Here: “It can be found at 3C outlets, where the device is sold in the US$249 to US$269 range.” Carry’s site.
Harddrives.
Harddrives are less of a contender for me because the harddrives they use are pretty much laptop harddrives and these often give problems. A CD with pictures won’t lock up on you as a harddrive might, loosing you everything (it might break but you can just send a copy home). So I haven’t listed many options here.
The coolest option, if you have one of the newer iPods, is the Belkin iPod Media Reader. It’s about US$80, and lets you save data from your media cards on your iPod. Funky, but be careful traveling with iPods. They’re very stealable. Also, reviews seem to indicate the transfers are so slow that your iPods battery might run out before you’ve transferred all your pictures.
The FlashTrack is US$700 for 80 Gigs, US$400 for 20 Gigs seems one of the typical dodgy options. You need to buy an adaptor if you want to use anything else than Flash memory cards.
The big boys seem to be entering the playing field as well. Nikon has the Nikon Coolwalker is a bit expensive at US$500. Sorry for the large picture.
Not yet available.
There are also some promising options that aren’t yet available.
Sony has a promising 40Gigs portable harddrive (supposed to be available in Japan now) and a portable CD writer, the Sony MCS1 PhotoVault Mini CD-R Station at US$199 at Amazon (not yet available) - it burns photos to mini CD-R (which only hold 200M) instead of the standard writable CD’s.
Finally, the Delkin USB Bridge, at US$70, means you don’t need a computer to get data out of your camera, but you still need storage, like a normal (not standalone) CD writer (they’re cheap these days at US$75 or less). Some experimentation required, but may well be a great option.
What’s your experience? Real life stories very welcome!
August 7th, 2004 at 7:47 am
For people who use CF cards, the Archos GMini 220 (soon to be replaced with a model with a color screen) is great. It’s small, has a 20GB hard drive, plays mp3 files and records voice too.
September 3rd, 2004 at 7:36 am
Hi Peter,
On my last trip to India (Dec 2003-Jan 2004) I struggled with the same problem. I ended up buying an X Drive II. I can’t remember the price, but it was way less than buying another couple of CompactFlash cards, as I was initially considering. The drive holds 40Gb, reads a range of flash cards and is battery powered (with AC recharging). It has an LCD screen, but the feedback is terrible - you cannot see if your files are there, you just get a little visual that indicates that the transfer is taking place. I tested it several times before the trip and it worked without problems (though I was still a little dubious about it). But it held all the photos I took from my five week trip and had miles of room to spare.
January 15th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Just bought a new Canon S2 IS and a 2 GB card. I want to take both movies and stills and I know that 2 GB won’t go far. So a portable storage seems to be the way when on vacation. But as Dey says, I too am worried about the files being there before I delete off of the SC card. Anything out there that I can preview the cd or dvd before deleting the SD card?
Thank you.
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