Portable Hard Drives For Travel Image Storage

Portable Hard Drives For Travel Image Storage

Bridge built in the 11th Century over the Rhone in Avignon Provence

• One Terabyte

One terabyte remote hard drives are readily available and since this is equivalent to 1000 Gigabytes, you would imagine that it is more than enough for the traveling digital photographer using a 12 megapixel camera.

Of course it wasn't too long ago that one hundred gigabytes in a hard drive no bigger than a deck of cards was pretty impressive. But now the small remote hard drives are approaching three terabytes and there are even flash drives coming that will store one TB.

A one terabyte portable hard drive should be adequate, however, on a two week photo trip even with video making and large-file, digital camera capture modes for marketable travel photos.

See tips on making better travel photos.

• Seagate

Check out the one terabyte remote hard drives from Seagate at under $100 USD. They are USB 3(and 2) and are fast, small, and robust.

One terabyte portable hard drive from Seagate

At that price you could probably afford two drives as a double backup, one stored in luggage, one in your shoulder pack. I like to carry two remote drives and make a double backup for images that are important to me.

The Seagate portable hard drives are sold by computer stores or online through Amazon and B&H Photo.

Note Softseattravel is associated with Amazon.

Gothic Castle built in the 12th Century by the Popes in 
Avignon,  Provence

• Large Files

Large file capture will be important if you want to sell your travel photos. It is best to create your photos in Raw mode and then save that file as a Raw file. You can always convert those files to jpegs or tiffs, depending on what the photo editor wants. Many editors and stock agencies want large sized jpegs, 25 megs and up. When you are converting and storing, you will need adequate storage space.

Your work might involve converting files from Raw mode to tiff copies and then to jpeg copies; files will use up storage space fast.       

See Tips to  Improve Your Travel Photos

Bike trail on the Burgundy Canal, Dijon, France

• Raw Mode

Raw mode is useful in part because it lends itself to batch processing. With the cameras software or Photoshop, you can give the files their keyword name and you can correct for chromatic aberration, white balance, and a host of other tweaks. Raw mode capture creates your digital negatives and those digital negatives could retain value year after year with repeat sales. You can apply new techniques to these same negatives as you develop skills and as imaging software evolves.

• Tiff and Jpeg

Tiff files are handy as an intermediate step between Raw and Jpeg, and for some editors, the final product.

As an intermediate step, Tiff lends itself to tweaks not possible in Raw.  These tweaks could include perspective correction and levels changes in specific areas of the photo.  

Jpeg files, on the other hand, do not offer a good format for tweaking.  Jpeg is more the delivery format for sending photos over the internet to photo buyers, stock agencies and photo editors. This could be in the form of a large file to an editor or a small file in an email as part of a proposal or query letter. 

Likely you will be converting and saving files in the three formats while traveling and this will require a good remote hard drive for storage.                     

Better Photos, Tips

Next: other tools for the Photographer traveling light