Thoughts on Transferring Photos Taken On Vacation To A Computer

The Wall of Quebec 

Bar Harbor, Maine

Historic Quebec City

Stephen King Home in Bangor Maine

Some of you who are readers of my blog know that I enjoy photography. I recently decided to try a different way of uploading pictures from my recent trip to Maine and Quebec to my home computer. When I travel, I take my laptop with me and use it to transfer pictures from my memory card to it. Should my memory card fail, a backup of my pictures is on my laptop. When I get home, I transfer the pictures over to my home computer from any memory cards that I used. Note that I take my pictures using a Raw format which can be as much as three times larger than pictures taken in a more conventional .jpg format. I also took about 750 pictures on this vacation and used almost 5GB of memory.

Lower Town of Quebec City 

Lower Town of Quebec City at Night

What I decided to do this time was set up a SugarSync account since you are allowed 5GB of free storage. I set up a folder on both my laptop and home desktop to sync pictures from my laptop to desktop. While my desktop was off while I was away, any pictures transferred to my computer would sync with my SugarSync account and be in the cloud if need be. When I returned home, I turned on my desktop and my files were synced from my laptop to desktop over several hours. It took this long as the total size of pictures transferred approached my maximum limit of 5GB. If I am not in a rush to transfer my pictures this is a very worthwhile idea. If I am in a rush, I could have transferred my pictures as I have previous while having a copy in the cloud. Using memory cards to transfer pictures is quite a bit quicker. Should you not be taking pictures using a Raw format (I recommend you do if your camera allows you to), the time required to transfer your pictures will be quite a bit quicker. This is especially so if you do not take as many pictures as I do on a trip. For those who edit their pictures using Photoshop or any other editing software, I highly recommend the following: Create an additional folder for unedited pictures. Copy your pictures prior to editing them to this folder. This is a record copy of your unedited pictures and you will not do any editing of pictures that are in this folder. You should always keep a set of your pictures that are unedited should you ever need to go back to them later.

One other thought here. If you do not upload pictures from your memory cards while you are on vacation, carry extra memory cards and alternate using them daily. Should a memory card stop working for whatever reason, you will have pictures on another memory card and not all of your pictures taken on your vacation will be lost.

Enjoy your vacations and go get some good pictures.

Thunder Hole at Acadia National Park in Maine

Acadia National Park

Flickr - A Different Type of Photo Sharing Site

If you not only enjoy sharing photos but also being able to learn about photography as well, then you may wish to check out Flickr. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and a Yahoo account is required but worth it if you wish to have a Flickr account. As of a year ago, Flickr had over 26 million users.

A free account allows you to only see the last 200 pictures you have posted and you can only post a picture to 10 groups. Groups relate to a topic which can be related to camera gear used, locations, types of photos, etc.  You can discuss in these groups not only photography but also topics relevant to the group. If you are travelling, there is probably a group for the places you are visiting that you can check out for pictures posted in the group and even post questions or comments about the area.  For $24.94 a year you can get a Pro account. This enables you to have stats on your account, unlimited uploads and storage, ad free browsing and other benefits. No matter what type of account you have, you can tag your photos which enables pictures to be found easier when doing a search by topic.

This is such a popular site for photography that in May of 2009 the official White House photographer Peter Souza started to use Flickr as a way to release White House photos.

If you have even a passing interest in photography this is a site worth checking out. You do not need to have an account to go through the site and check out the pictures and groups. You may decide to stay awhile.  Click to see pictures in my Flickr account.