It’s just under a week until I leave to go to South America for nine weeks. And I’m almost finished getting my stuff together.
One of the issues I’ve been facing when travelling is how do I manage my pictures. The last time when I went to Africa I got by with my larger memory card. But since then I’ve got my new Nikon D7000 giving me higher resolution and larger files.
So I’ve been digging around to find a lightweight and affordable solution and this is what’s coming with me this trip
The whole setup is based around my Samsung Galaxy SII, no special rom or other hacks. Just the default from Samsung.
I’ve known that the device had a usb host possibility and my initial thought was to copy my memory card to the phone and then either upload it all, or switch to a bigger memory stick for storage.
Uploading would be a pain since I would have to get a good wifi connection and I’m not to sure that would be possible in South America. At least not in the way I’m travelling. And it would take ages.
So I decided in trying with a memory stick. You’ll then have two issues; you’ll need a big memory stick or multiple, and I would have needed a large micro SD card for my device to hold the images temporarily.
The first issue I thought I might solve with a portable hard drive. Problem is that the new portable drives have no external power connections. You get the big one with external power, but then you get a lot to carry around again.
So I decided to try using a powered hub, that would provide the drive with power and I would have to carry less than a bulky big drive.
Connecting the drive to my phone using the USB hub worked flawlessly. Unless you consider the fact that I had to partition my drive using FAT32, which isn’t really smart when it comes to saving space. And it seems that when the partition volume exceed 500Gb the phone had problems with keeping a connection with the drive.
So I decided to split the drive in two, one FAT32 volume and one NTFS. Then I got 320 Gb of storage which should last a while, and if I connect the drive to a PC I can move the files from the FAT32 volume to the NTFS volume and get more space.
So then I had my phone connected to my portable drive. And out of curiosity I decided to see what happened when I plugged my memory card reader with my SD card from my camera into the same hub.
I was surprised that anything happened, but my phone mounted both drives!
That means I can now connect both the SD card and the drive at once, and do a copy directly between the card and the drive. No need for a bigger micro SD card in my phone.
So there you go, one solution that I think will work perfectly for me.
I get good storage space, remarkably quick transfer time of pictures and all in quite a little package.
Do you have any favorite ways to keep copies of your photos while travelling ?
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