Comments on: Managing Photos on the Road

By: Dave Dean

Dave Dean

In reply to Oscar X Quint. Glad it helped, Oscar!

By: Oscar X Quint

Oscar X Quint

Thank you for this post Dave. This is exactly what we need too. Me and my wife decided to take a year honeymoon traveling the world. Is been 3 months and all the pictures we have taken with our goPro, SLR and iPhone are getting very hectic. I do note that when I bought a new small laptop at best buy it came with the option of Microsoft office($40 a year for first timers) and they offered a free 1Tb cloud storage called OneDrive. I works similar to iCloud. Good internet is hard to find , so your 3 plus year post is what i’m doing for now on…Gracias

By: Dave Dean

Dave Dean

In reply to Louise. Hi Louise -- the answer depends on what other devices (if any) you're travelling with. Let me know if you're going to have a smartphone, tablet or neither (and what brand/model), and I can make some suggestions.

By: Louise

Louise

Great info, thanks. What would be your suggestions for people like me who are going traveling for a year or so but without a laptop ?! I can’t seem to figure out how I will easily back up photos online (will probably have limited access to computers/internet) and more so, how I will be able to edit anything!

By: Dave Dean

Dave Dean

In reply to Ima.

I’ll recap the answer I left to this question on our Facebook page, for anyone else that comes along in the future:

It totally depends on where you are in the world. In places like Taiwan or South Korea, it’d be done before you’d finished checking your email. In Myanmar, it wouldn’t finish this decade, and in Australia or New Zealand, it’d take a while and you’d be paying for the privilege. I’m referring to wi-fi here — in some places, you’d be much better off doing it over 3G, but it’s often hard/expensive to get unlimited data plans, especially on prepaid.

All that to say, don’t rely solely on cloud backup for this (or to be honest, all except a very small number of photos). Take a portable hard drive and backup to that as your primary destination, and just leave your cloud backup to do its thing as and when it can. If you’re worried, you could also try to Fedex USB sticks/SD cards/hard drives back home again now and then as well. Dustin put together a good piece about this — https://toomanyadapters.com/backup-your-photos-like-a-pro/ — it’s three years old now, but the fundamentals haven’t changed.

By: Ima

Ima

This article is exactly what I need. I’m heading off on an epic adventure all over the world (no place specifically). I’m a semi pro photographer (I make money when I sell my stuff – you wanna buy some stuff?). I take Raw and Jpg images and will be using a 50mp camera on this trip. I have a plan to use my laptop and 1 or 2 external drives to backup my stuff. I’ve recently been trying out Amazon Prime free image space as my cloud services. The question I have, now that it’s 2015 – will I get any luck with the local (I don’t know where I’ll be just yet) internet connection / bandwidth. some general answers would be helpful like — If you go to x place don’t expect to get connection, but if your in y place then you should be good to go.

By: Chris

Chris

I find it pretty difficult with a DSLR and shooting RAW. I’m totally reliant on external hard drives and probably am in bad habits of not backing up regularly enough.

In theory cloud storage is great. The problem is just guaranteeing your internet connection on the road. Regardless of how fast your broadband is, just one RAW file takes long enough. When you’re talking hundreds you’re soon spending less time travelling and more time uploading!

By: Dave Dean

Dave Dean

In reply to Jason. Interesting option for those of us that take a lot of photos (or especially video, I guess). It's quite a high price point for everybody else I think, but for those who really need vast amounts of space, $100/year is probably pretty cheap.

By: Adventures Wtih Pedro

Adventures Wtih Pedro

Great article, I hate to see people lose photos. Few things to consider though:

Flickr: Doesn’t allow storage of raw files so if you take raw that’s not really an option for you.

I prefer Just Cloud, its cheap and has unlimited storage. I can access the files anywhere and the backup is seamless. I just posted a similar article myself:

http://adventureswithpedro.com/backup-your-photos/

By: Jason

Jason

I just started using BitCasa recently which is unlimited storage for $99/year. It’s cloud-based that acts like a local drive. Similar to Dropbox it also support auto-syncing of photos captured with your mobile device.