Storing images on while traveling

June 1, 2005 9:15 PM

I'm looking for a way to send my digital images (taken in .raw from my canon) to some sort of storage bin.

I've looked at the Media Reader for the iPod and it's received horrible reviews and the Epson P-2000 is waaaay out of my price range. Is there some sort of portable harddrive or decent media reader to aid me when I'm snapping pictures on the go? (I'm looking in the 150-200 or less price range)

posted by Hands of Manos to sports, hobbies, & recreation (12 comments total)

I don't know if this is of any help, but is buying another memory card an option? If so, you could just carry the extra card with you and switch as needed - then switch back to put the pictures onto your computer.
posted by tozturk at 9:17 PM on June 1, 2005

I'm with tozturk. I have three 1gb memory cards which I purchased for less than $150 total. Between them, they store ~1500 photos from my d70. Unless I'm on a multi-month around-the-world tour, that should be plenty.

I, too, recommend just buying additional memory cards. (They're less hassle, anyhow.)
posted by jdroth at 9:20 PM on June 1, 2005

jdroth, in RAW+JPEG mode, a 1GB card will hold about 100 photos (in my experience with the D70).

But, I still vote for getting a few 1GB cards, they're so small and they fit in your price range. Do you need to store more than 300 photos?
posted by knave at 9:53 PM on June 1, 2005

VoSonic makes a lot of varieties of "Image Bank/Tanks" -- some come with built-in MP3 players, others have built-in LCD screens, and of course you have your no-frills versions as well.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:31 AM on June 2, 2005

jdroth, in RAW+JPEG mode, a 1GB card will hold about 100 photos (in my experience with the D70).

True, true. Thanks for the correction.

For day-to-day use, I don't use RAW, and so I forget that it's the mode I'd want for touring, etc.
posted by jdroth at 5:43 AM on June 2, 2005

yeah I shoot only in raw and I take a lot of photos. I can burn through a card and a half (1 gig cards) easily and I kept thinking "what a shame, I have this ipod with 10gigs on it and it's just sitting there").

So I'd love to purchase one of those ipod card readers, but they get such horrible reviews
posted by Hands of Manos at 5:56 AM on June 2, 2005

I have a portable card->CD burner that has a rechargeable battery. It works REALLY well. Blank CDs don't take up much space, and your storage is limited by what you want to carry. I usually burn two copies, then wipe the card. The one I have is the Roadstor It does disc spanning and filling, so you don't have to match the disc size to your card.

Since I bought that, Addonics has come out with a DVD version (they also make a CD version that seems identical to the Roadstor), but I'm not sure that's a good idea - there's something to be said for spreading the photos around to multiple discs so if something goes bad, you don't lose all of them (of course, the DVD version also burns CDs).

This can also be used as a standalone DVD/CD/mp3 player to attach to a TV for use while traveling.
posted by Caviar at 8:45 AM on June 2, 2005

A couple alternative suggestions...

While I was traveling in South America, I found a lot of places that would copy the contents of a Compact Flash card to CD-Rs. Make sure you check the contents of the discs before you clear your cards! You can make multiple CDs and mail one set home while you carry the other.

If you're going to be somewhere where Internet cafes are common but not so slick that they block you from accessing the USB ports of their machines, you could take a card reader and an mp3 player (or any external hard drive) and just copy them by hand.

Note: If you're a Mac user with an iPod trying to do this, you probably want to reformat your iPod on a Windows machine. Macs read Windows filesystems, but not vice-versa.
posted by aneel at 9:03 AM on June 2, 2005

I'm guessing you don't have a laptop, as that probably would've been mentioned by now. But for posterity's sake (future Google searches), I bought an external usb/firewire hard drive enclosure that I can then stick any size drive into. At first, when I only had a meager digital camera, I'd cart around a 30GB drive with more than enough room to spare. Now that I shoot exclusively in RAW, I tote around a bigger drive. For what it's worth, CompUSA is having a sale this week on 160GB drives for $29 after rebate. just picked one up to supplement my upcoming trip to Scandinavia.
posted by Hankins at 10:35 AM on June 2, 2005

Good luck with that. I can't think of a legitimate reason for them to be selling $130 drives with $100 in rebates. Think about that for a minute. They're so anxious to get these out the door as quickly as possible that they're 75% off. I would NOT use that drive as the main storage source of irreplaceable photos in a foreign country.
posted by Caviar at 10:51 AM on June 2, 2005

Hankins, yeah actually I have a tablet pc that's very portable (12") but it' still bulky to xf data to at times. so I was looking for something faster

these are all great answers! thanks everyone!
posted by Hands of Manos at 11:37 AM on June 2, 2005

There's another advantage to using CD-Rs that I forgot to mention. If you're paranoid about losing stuff, it's really easy to burn an extra copy and mail them home periodically, so even in the unlikely event that your whole bag goes missing, you'll still have a bunch of photos from your trip.
posted by Caviar at 12:49 PM on June 2, 2005