Suggestion: local electrical connection/plug in. If you can't buy or have an adapter it is possible to simply buy a local'replacement' plug. You can either cut off the USA plug and rewire with the local plug. You can also wire on the local plug and leave the USA plug intact.
next: Europe at least most of Western Europe is up with the general USA in consumer technical matters! In many cases because they are coming in late there equipment is state of the art.

Uploading to a website from Europe isn't practical in the first place. You can take the card to a shop and have it put on a CD.
Downloading to your computer will not take long using a USB connection. I download most of a 512MB card in a matter of minutes.

As much as I tired of repeating this (and you all may tired of hearing it), I just want to remind people that CD and DVD media is not 100% reliable. I myself feel very nervous if I would ever have only one copy of my pictures on a CD burned at some shop I'd never heard of.

Also know that CDs and DVDs can start failing over time. If you do rely on someone having burned a CD for you while on vacation, I suggest you burn a second copy IMMEDIATLEY upon returning home. Otherwise you'll forget, and in five years you may be sorry. Take it from someone who has seen more than one CD go bad over the years.

Andrew

It is good to bring it up. Getting ready to get an external hard drive to store/backup photos.

bookmarking for the digitally challenged...

External hard drives are great. Just remember: you need to have at least two copies of your files, on separate pieces of hardware. If you save a copy on your ext. hard drive, that means you still keep the original on your computer hard drive or on a second ext. hard drive.

Andrew

Andrew,
Thank you for your insight and comments.
I do not intend to fill the 2GB card and even if I did I would not upload the entire thing to an online photo store. Instead I plan to create different albums and store them on an external drive once I get home. I never intended to spend time uploading at an internet café; I was only commenting on another poster's question who wondered if he could do something like that.
As for having several cards rather than 1 huge one, I know myself well enough that I would misplace one of the cards and it would be the one with all of my pix on it. This way I can keep my focus on the one (no pun intended).
What might be good for one traveler might not be the answer for another.
Michèle

Forget misplacing. When I went to England last summer for my honeymoon, I brought 3 512Mg cards. Good thing, too -- as the second day, one of them simply stopped working. The camera said the card was unreadable. Took it into a camera shop later, they tried to reformat it, but it was dead. Luckily that was before I put any photos on it!

If you have one big card, and that craps out, then what? :)

When I buy my Xd memories, Olympus thoughtfully provides a handy-dandy holder in the package that I can clip six chips into. With 256mb cards, that gives me 1792 megabytes of storage, or about 1500 pictures at 4mp resolution in a convenient form.

I buy the 256 size because a) a single failure won't wipe out an entire vacation's images, and b) each pixel costs less than in the larger formats.

<i>p.s.</i> I wouldn't take a corrupted card to a photo shop. Google <b>recover camera memory</b> to see what's out there. It's likely that GreenDragon's images could have been salvaged.

If a memory card is dead, it's dead. If the camera couldn't format it and the camera store also couldn't format it, chances are that it really was dead.

However, sometimes there is a &quot;soft&quot; corruption where the camera files become unreadable yet they can still be recovered. In this case you WOULD be able to format the card. If that happens, you could try something called PC Inspector (freeware) to recover your images from that card - again, IF it is just corrupted but not actually bad. Just Google for &quot;PC Inspector&quot; - I've used it, it works. Make sure you get the English version - the software is from Germany!

I use 1GB and 2GB cards now because when I shoot in RAW format, my Canon 5D's RAW files are 12-13MB EACH. A 256MB card will hold fewer pictures than a 24-image roll of film! Also, I'm often shooting at dusk and I don't want to mess with changing cards all the time in low light if I can avoid it.

Since I take a laptop on vacation, I know the same evening whether my pictures could be read from the card, so I know I won't lose a whole vacation's worth of pictures. And yes, I have several 1GB and 2GB memory cards. You can get great deals even on the big ones now (I've seen 2GB CF flash cards for under $50 now).

Andrew

The other thing that speaks for a large card is the ability to take short movies. My sons do this a lot with their kids.

That's true, Gretchen, you can take those short movies with some cameras, but they eat up space on your card quickly! I probably wouldn't take too many of those movies unless I had a laptop with me or a bunch of extra memory cards!

Andrew

&quot;However, sometimes there is a &quot;soft&quot; corruption where the camera files become unreadable yet they can still be recovered.&quot;

Yes, but not by a typical clerk in a typical camera store. These guys know about lenses and apertures and autofocus and depth-of-field, not solid-state electronics.

You don't need to be an expert in solid state electronics to know if a memory card is bad. If you can't format it in your camera and someone else can't format it in their camera or machine, chances are it's bad.

Andrew

I couldn't disagree more.

These software fixes require skills and knowledge that store clerks don't typically possess. It may be necessary to reconstruct a directory by hand, for example, and that's strictly computer geek stuff.

If a memory can't be read by a camera, chances are very good that the images are still intact but inaccessable without repairing the card's data structures. It's tedious, but some images are worth it.

Perhaps you didn't read where I wrote that I hadn't taken any pics on it that day? I'd downloaded to my laptop the day before, put it in the camera the next morning -- not readable. Used the other cards in the meantime.

Where did you say that? I read this:

&quot;When I went to England last summer for my honeymoon, I brought 3 512Mg cards. Good thing, too -- as the second day, one of them simply stopped working.&quot;

<i>Nowhere did you state that you hadn't used the card yet that day.</i>

Oh. I see.

You are welcome to disagree, Robespierre.

Andrew

Andrew,that is exactly why the 1G card is good--movies do use up memory--and it is what I said. They don't do it in Europe BUT they do do it at home. It is just something that newbies to digital may not know.