Photo Backup While Traveling

We’ve all been there. You take hundreds of photos during your travels. Whether they’re of travel friends, architecture, historical sights, food, directions….they are all important and are likely things that we would like to have to remember our trip.

The last thing you want to have happen is to arrive home to find that you’re missing photos, or that they are unreadable (does this strike fear in anyone else’s very soul??)

Perhaps even worse is halfway through your trip, you run out of space. 

So solutions? You have basically three options. Internet-based storage, external hard-drives, and laptop storage. It’s important to note that you should probably have at least two backups of your photos, just in case one is lost/stolen/dropped/destroyed.

Internet-Based Storage:

There are lots of pros to internet-based storage. The world is getting much more connected. Travellers are starting to expect internet connectivity, wifi-preferably, but at least a computer with a connection.

If you take photos mostly with your phone, many internet-based storage solutions are accessible by an app, and can even come with automatic uploading whenever you connect to wifi (no longer the worry that you’ll forget to upload the days photos!)

1. Dropbox: 

The most widely used of the internet storage options is Dropbox. While it has its limitations (starting with the minimal amount of storage that is available for free – which can be worked around by paying for more storage), it can be accessed via an app, or on any computer. Your photos and documents can be accessed from anywhere and it provides security in the sense that your photos should be safe from being stolen or getting lost.

2. Shutterfly/Flickr/Piccasso:

Internet-based storage is an excellent option if you have a reliable connection to semi-strong wifi. However, make sure to do your research if you plan to print off your own photos. On my first backpacking trip, I used shutterfly, as I really hadn’t given much thought to storage before I left, and found myself having to choose which photos to delete, and uploading hundreds to Facebook. When I got back home and wanted to have a hard copy of my photos, I realized I would essentially have to buy them back from shutterfly as photos or on a disk. (It is worth noting that I could go through and save each photo I wanted to my desktop, without having to purchase them, but who really wants to do that with over 12,000 photos?). They don’t make it easy to have a hard copy of your photos, however they do have frequent sales throughout the year, so if you wait for one, you can get a decent price. For less than 80$, I was able to get my high-resolution photos shipped to me on disks. The shutterfly app is reasonably easy to navigate and uploading is easy to start.

Now, with advances in photo storage, and many travellers choosing to store only electronic copies of photos, having hard copies may not be something that is important to you. If this is the case, these online storage options could be an excellent storage solution.

3. Google Photos:

Recently I’ve been using google photos as a good backup location. My photos can be easily saved without my having to buy them back. The app also organizes photos by location, and also by what’s in the photo. Looking for a photo of that cool castle you saw? Search within the app for ‘castle’ and you’ll be presented with any photos taken which are automatically in the category. While it’s not perfect, it’s very close to being so!

 

External Hard-Drives:

While initially a potentially expensive option, external hard drives have made excellent growth in their size, weight and flexibility. No longer is it impossible to carry two or three backup hard drives. No longer do you need multiple chords to transfer items.

1. Phone Adaptors

These amazing products are small, usb-style drives that plug directly into your phone and give you extra storage; as much as 128gb. You can then delete photos and videos off of your device, safe in the knowledge that they are on the drive. When you return to your laptop, they can be removed from the device and put onto a larger hard-drive, or laptop for additional storage (or put onto disks, etc).

My favourite option is the  iBridge Leef adaptor. For as little as 49$ US you can add between 16 to 128 GB of space to your phone. This can be to store photos/videos, or can also be used to store movies or music that can be played on your phone. From the ibridge, you can then put your photos onto a computer or larger external hard drive. There are also several other options from companies like sandisk, Sony, etc.

2. Wifi-Enabled Portable Storage

This portable storage is essentially an external hard-drive, but it is not just limited to your phone. With wifi connectivity, you can connect your camera (if it has these capabilities), phone, or any other devices. These can have very large amounts of storage, and essentially eliminate the need to bring a laptop for storage solutions. The Passport Wireless device offers the ability to secure an unsecured wifi connection, ability to connect up to eight devices, transfers photos and videos via wifi signal, and also via an app, allows you to insert a SD camera storage and will pull photos from the drive automatically (knowing which photos/videos have already been saved), and, as if thats not enough, you can insert a USB drive into the device, and then can stream the files (movies? anyone?) to a tv or viewing device, directly from the USB drive. Offering up to 4TB of storage, it’s highly unlikely you’ll need anything else. Seagate also offers a similar item.

Laptop Storage

The one major benefit of laptop storage is that you can download your photos/video safely, without an internet connection. If you’re going to areas without internet connectivity, this may be a great option for you.

It’s also quick to download photos/videos to your laptop, and you can download from multiple sources at the same time. If you use your laptop to do basic editing, you can do so while photos are being downloaded to the computer. If done on a regular basis (daily?), you can also use this time to tag photos for easier sorting later, when it’s much more difficult to remember where exactly that beautiful sunset was taken!

No matter what method you use to backup your media, make sure you choose at least two of the above. Hard drives can fail/crash, laptops can be stolen, and internet-based systems can have the occasional error which makes your media unreadable. If you have additional sources of backup, while not totally fail-safe, at least you can minimize your risk of having your data lost.