How to deal with all those digital photos I'll be taking?
 

I got a digital camera for my upcoming trip and am looking for info/suggestions about how to store &/or send photos from Europe. I'm a phobic techno-idiot, and I do NOT want to spend a lot of time in internet cafes when I could be seeing art or walking thru Tuscan countryside, so I need something easy. Should I just email pictures (probably not?), or store them on a disk til I get home, or use one of those on-line services where you can upload them for all your friends to see, and then what do you do when you get home? can you just download them or do you have to buy them or what? If you recommend this option, what company is easy and inexpensive?

Memory cards are comparatively cheap (as opposed to the cost of travel), just buy enough to take all the pictures you want and deal with them when you get home; there's no reason to waste travel time uploading pictures and such. If you want a backup or something, many internet cafes will let you burn a disk, it's relatively trivial to do, or many picture developing places will do it for you (for a fee, of course).

As mentioned, memory cards are relatively inexpensive. They're small to carry as well.

My suggestion is that you have the camera set to the highest resolution. Setting to a lower resolution will permit more shots to be stored on the card but at a lower quality.

I've also noticed something else.

I have a good SLR film camera. On previous trips I'd take about a roll of 24 per day.

I have now moved to a digital SLR camera (8 megapixel) and find that when I'm out taking photos, I just shoot away. I'm concerned that I'll take way too many.

At this time I have two cards that each hold about 250 photos at the highest jpg resolution.

We'll be going on a trip in a couple of months for two weeks and I'm thinking of adding another card.

All cameras will allow you to delete photos, so just delete ones you don't like when you've got a bit of free time

The resolution debate really depends on what you plan to do with the pictures; for maximum versatility, or for actual printing, I would strongly recommend using the highest resolution, but if the pictures are going to be used only on computers, you can get away with somewhat lower (I have a 5 MP camera, but usually have it at 3 MP, because that's well over what a computer monitor can display, plus is good enough for small prints, which is all I would be making).

Hi K,

On a 3 week visit to Italy I took 1075 pix.

Each evening I deleted the pix that were not very good.

I finished with 850 pix stored on 3 memory cards.

At home, I uploaded all my pix to my computer and saved 700 of them.

You can buy cheap devices to upload directly from your memory media to your computer. These are much faster than using the camera to upload.

((I))

As has been suggested, take several memory cards and download when you get home. I don't delete many pictures first hand from the camera as I can't see the details that well--unless it is just a real bust!

I second the idea of a card reader. I have a little thing that plugs into the USB port on my computer - the memory card slots into it. Much less drain on the computer battery, and much less fiddly that having to cart around special leads and connectors for the camera.

The one downside is that memory cards are relatively expensive.

You can get a 512M secure digital card on ebay, still in the packaging, for about $25 including shipping -- that stores about 300 pics at 3.2M (what my camera takes at the highest).

I went through almost one of these a day on my latest trip to England, but then again -- I sell my photos, so was taking lots to get a couple good ones. I did discard many of them, but hubbie had laptop with him, so I just cleared them every day. I had three cards but rarely used the third.

I took over 3000 on the two week trip.

I'm a photoholic!!!!

My next trip my best friend is taking her laptop. If she wasn't, I'd go have them made into a CD or DVD at a local shop periodically.

Memory cards are not expensive if you look for the sales and rebates. I think my 512Mp cost $30. Shop CompUSA, Office Depot, Office Max.

I just saw that Circuit City is selling a 2.0 GB Sandisk memory card for $80. It is hard to believe how powerful and cheap these have become.

For the average traveler (me), a 512 card is more than I need for a 2 week trip. Last time I came home with 300 images, and had plenty of spare room.((#))

You can buy a "download" cord that downloads you pictures to your video/picture IPod, then somehow you download those later to your computer. I don't know a lot about it, but you could do research on apple.com

hey thanks everybody! it sounds like everyone agrees that buying plenty of memory to last the trip is the best idea. and since i only print 4 x 6" snapshots it sounds like 3 MP should be fine (any disagreement there? i can set it to 4 MP if i need to, but then i'll need more memory.) i was hoping i'd hear that it's easy to upload pictures at a public computer to one of those sites like kodakgallery or snapfish, so i could share photos with family and friends as i go along. i'm travelling alone, and will miss being able to share the experience with others or talk about it over dinner!

If you are contemplating uploading pictures, go to some place in your city and see if you can and what it will take to do it.

OH, wait, I see you are on a European trip. I think it is problematic to do it in Europe.

Kahern, I strongly recommend you leave your camera at the highest setting rather than 3MP. The other function which affects quality and file size is compression, and again I would recommend using the highest quality setting your camera has. Even though you plan to print only 4X6, there may be one or two shots on your memory cards worth enlarging, or a shot that you want to crop, and you will need that extra quality. If you have used the lower quality settings on your camera it will then be too late to do anything about it.

You are a novice at digital photography now, but as you gain experience you will want to experiment. When you download those photos to your home computer, they will be on your hard drive as long as you leave them there (you should back them up to cd or portable hard disk though). With a photo-quality printer, you can go back even months later to make additional prints, and play around with photo editing software. Sometimes that's nearly as much fun as taking the shots in the first place, and can become addictive.

Whether you want to sit around internet cafes during your trip, downloading and emailing photos is up to you. There are better things to do on holiday tha sitting in front of a computer, IMO.

I'm with heimdall. Shoot with the highest settings, and then you can do anything you want later (even years later) when you are not such a novice. My brother is making calendars from some travel pictures he took 20 years ago (obviously not digital - he's had to scan them and manually clean them up). Shutterfly.com has a great calendar product, and I have also made shutterfly books from my travel pictures.

Once you've taken a picture, you can never get a higher quality. And while memory can seem expensive, as grsing has noted, compared to the cost of travel, it is but a drop in the bucket. Even at full price in a camera store (I have ended up buying memory cards while in Europe) there is no comparison with the high cost of film and developing.

I routinely take hundreds of pictures (100/day is not unusual for me). The last two trips (Dec/Jan and March) are the first ones that I have not taken a film camera (for 3 years I have shot both digital and film) and I felt naked at first. I miss my slr and good lenses (I usually had 28 to 300 capability), and my pictures are not quite as fabulous because of it. At the same time it is very freeing - it certainly is easy to shoot with my 4mp camera that is carried in a jeans or jacket pocket.

kahern and all, great thread, thanks! Ira, I wish I lived near you so I could come by for the proverbial slide show.

VS :-"

noe847, if you are like me you will end up with a digital SLR eventually. Unfortunately my old MF Nikkor lenses weren't very useful with the new Nikon D70 SLR, but perhaps you will be luckier. If your lenses are compatible, all you need is the dSLR body, and away you go!

What about those of us who know that we would take more photos than we can afford to buy memory cards for? Does anyone know of shops that will download gigabytes of photos and burn onto DVD? How much would it cost to do this in Italy, Switzerland and Paris?