View Full Version : Photo Management
fireneck
02-20-2012, 21:59
What different ways do people save their digital photos while thru-hiking?
A bunch of memory cards? Uploading along the way? Sending it to a cloud?
I will have support back home from my mom and girlfriend, however, they either have no knowledge or a full time student and work 30 hours a week. So uploading photos is not going to be happening.
Thoughts, ideas?
RWheeler
02-20-2012, 22:39
I'm going to try to upload all of mine to my Dropbox (https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/referral.txt?w=c2e64361) account whenever I have access to the web (the link is for a referral sign up - if you do it, we'd both get bonus space, but you can sign up for free and without referrals otherwise). Or, if it's practical, I'll burn the files to DVDs and mail copies back home.
RWheeler
02-20-2012, 22:40
Oops, I used the wrong link if you wanted a referral: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTc1NjEzNjY5
swjohnsey
02-20-2012, 23:34
You can get a couple thousand high resolution photos on a 4 Gig card. Card cost about six bucks.
My phone is my camera, so I tried to upload at least one photo for most days on trail to my trail journal when in trail towns, just accumulated the rest. This last year I uploaded the occasional photo to facebook as well, though not often. On a couple of trips I've stopped in a trail town to burn a photo DVD and send that home as sort of backup. And on two trips I've ended up going home for a brief period en route (unplanned in both cases) where I was able to save photos directly to my computer from there. So sort of a mix!
You can buy a memory card with a wifi chip in it that will upload to your phone wherever you are. Pricey, but neat technology. Also, not all public computers allow files to be uploaded. I'm thinking of getting the fancy-pants memory card, uploading to my phone, and, from there, uploading to a journal. It'll also be easy to email the photos from my phone so they don't take up all the memory. Here's a link: http://www.eye.fi/
I bought a bunch of cheap memory cards off eBay then rotated mailing them home to my transcriber. Worked like a charm. Just be sure your "support" team knows how to save/back up all your pics.
If you are just carrying a typical camera, just buy a 2 or 3 32GB cards (it isn't like they weigh much) and carry them to the end. For those using their cell phones, they even make those mini SDHC in 32GB size now. That said, don't leave them laying on the trail at a break when you swap them out. I remember a story of a guy thru-hikng the PCT where it parallels the JMT and left a memory card on a rock when he swapped it out. He had to backtrack a full day searching for it at every place he had stopped before he fortunately found it. A better choice mightbe to mail them home or to a friend occasionally and asking someone to copy them to a harddrive before mailing them back.
When I hiked the PCT, I was recording alot of HD video from a camcorder so I was going through alot of memory. So I bounced a small cheap netbook with an USB external harddrive that I copied everything to about every 2 weeks. As I'm taking a 18megapixel DSLR with the plan of taking alot of HD video with it also, I'm probably going to repeat what I did for the PCT.