I will be bringing my digital camera to Europe with me this fall. I am a *bit* concerned re. all the theft stories that my camera will be stolen and I will lose all my pictures.

As we plan to check in at a few internet cafes/hotels with internet - I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas for places/websites that I can easily download my pictures to in order to save them in the event my camera is stolen. Any ideas?

Don't know of any specific internet cafes that would meet your need -- and I'm not sure how prevalent camera thefts are -- but here's another idea that might ease your mind.

If you have an ipod -- you can get an attachment that allows you to insert your camera's memory card and you can upload your pics to your ipod's hard drive.

Unless you had BOTH your camera and ipod stolen (which seems pretty unlikely in my book) -- you wouldn't lose your pics.

Use smaller cards and put used ones in suitcase

I was in Spain this year and almost all of the camera stores, even department stores, had a service of copying digital camera cards to CDs. The turaround time was only a few minutes and the cost was 3 or 4 euros. I would think that all over europe this service would be available. Also, the price of cards is coming down enough that you might just want to take extras. Good luck.

Hi harrowgirl, I worried about the same thing. I purchased an EZDigimagic DM180 palm size portable back up devise. Check our www.ezpnp-usa.com. I downloaded my pics each night and it worked great. It was kind of expensive but you get more storage for the price than if you bought 3 or 4 1GB cards.

Hi Harrowgirl!

Your fears about losing your priceless photos due to theft of your camera are valid. It happened to me last fall in Barcelona.

I was relieved, however, realizing that I'd downloaded my photos each night to my laptop, where I'd annotate the photos and update my journal, so I hadn't, I thought, lost too many photos. I purchased a replacement digital camera at our next stop, in Sevilla. But then, continuing my run of bad luck, my laptop hard drive crashed, so there go the photos afterall!

For the rest of the trip, I either had the photos downloaded to a CD or else uploaded them via the internet to my account at www.dotphoto.com. Given a choice of the two, in retrospect, I would go the photo shop route and download to a CD, as I found the internet connections in Spain to be too slow for uploading photos. Both internet cafes I used had only dial-up - not even DSL. Way too time-consuming for photo uploads.

I have since purchased a new laptop with a built-in CD burner, so I can download to the laptop each day and then burn to a cd, kept separate from both the camera and the laptop.

I got a case for ours with a neck strap and a belt clip. For extra security, you can get a wrist/neck strap and loop that through the opening in the case and secure that to the neck strap. And/or, rather than walk about with it hanging around your neck, wear it so the neck strap is over one shoulder and under your other arm.

But, so long as it's around your neck, you're not likely to be relieved of it. Just don't set it down anywhere and always keep it attached to yourself with either the wrist or neck strap.

I use an assortment of smaller cards, keeping the spares elsewhere. The cost of media has gone way, way down.

Though there are plenty of options while traveling for saving your photos, none are necessarily "easy" or economical.

I agree with those that recommend additional memory cards. I use one memory card a day, keeping used cards in the suitcase, not carrying them around with me. As indicated, 512MB and 1GB prices have really come down so as to make this suggestion practical.

I have heard, but have no first hand knowledge, that having CD's burned is a hit or miss proposition, in that people have discovered that once home, they cannot open the files on the CD for whatever reason. Be very cautious when deciding to erase the contents of your camera's storage media.