I need recommendations on services (Flickr, DropBox, etc) to backup my photo files while traveling using WiFi and my iPad. I have no need to share photos; my prime interest is backup as selected photos as a guard against loss or corruption of my flash cards. I found some 2-3 year old threads on this topic, but would like current thoughts.
I would also like recommendations on mobile iOS APPS to use. For example, for the Flickr service, is FlickStackr the best option for the iPad?
DropBox is the best!
All the smart techie young adults I know in the Bay Area, mostly working in Silicon Valley companies, use it. That is good enough for me.
Jim,
One service you could look at it SmugMug as they offer unlimited storage and it's a very user-friendly site. However, there is a small yearly charge (but quite reasonable IMHO). As I recall, their Servers are backed up in three different locations so photos should be absolutely safe.
I looked at a lot of different photo sites, but felt this was certainly among the best. They offer a mobile app called Camera Awesome for uploading photos taken with iPhone or iPads.
If you don't want to share, simply don't give anyone the web address for your site.
Cheers!
DropBox is a good one. Easy to use, you just configure it once, fetch the folders you want to and it does the job on the background.
Now here comes a tricky part regardless of software used: depending on your camera and its settings, your raw pic images will be large files. If you take hundreds of pics daily and want to upload all of them, a sluggish Wi-Fi connection at a hotel or cafe might not do the trick, even if you leave it uploading the whole night.
So you might consider, if that is the case, either:
Avoid letting your camera take pics on .TIFF raw format.
A better cloud storage option is Google Drive which gives you 5gb free storage compared to Dropbox's 2gb. Of course you could install both and get 7gb free storage.
I use shutterfly. That way I can order the prints if I want to when I am done. It is free and prints are not terribly expensive. Shutterfly has an app as well. It is quick and easy.
Someone gave me a good suggestions for sd cards as well, buy several of the small ones (4-8) instead of the really big ones (32-64).
I generally don't back up photos from my regular camera while overseas, and instead use (as someone else previously mentioned), a number of 8-16GB memory cards. Once one is filled, I just stash it away somewhere and carry on with a new one.
For photos I take with my phone, I just have the auto-upload feature of Dropbox that will automatically upload them when it has a cellular connection. Since I have T-Mobile and international roaming, this isn't that big of a concern, but you can also set it to just upload automatically when you're on Wifi instead of cellular networks.
If you have a smartphone, you can also get an adaptor that converts the micro-B USB connection of your phone into a female USB port that you can then plug your camera into. The phone, providing you have enough space and recent software, should allow you to import your photos to your phone from the camera. Note that if you're using a DSLR and shooting raw, it will generally only import your JPEG photos rather than all of them, so it may make sense to shoot with RAW+JPEG if you want to back them up. I'm only speaking about Android, but I expect iOS offers similar functionality.
Flickr is a great service and I use it to upload photographs, but only when they're properly sorted and edited. I generally think there are better services if you just want to stash them away somewhere for backup purposes.
I just keep all my pictures on a memory card or two from the camera and upload most of them (maybe 70% - anything halfway decent) to the ipad. That way, the pictures are two places - memory card and iPad. Since I don't carry my ipad with me - it stays in the hotel safe - I feel pretty secure. I also e-mail the very best pictures to friends at home, ccing myself, so worst case is that I can retrieve my absolute favorites from my or my friends email.
Maybe I should look into an app, though...
We take 200 or so photos between my wife and I. Each night, I transfer all of them to our MacBook Air while leaving them on the SDs. When the SDs fill, we use new ones. That way, there are copies in two places -- the MacBook and the SDs.
Every night on a trip, I upload my pictures directly to Picasa (free) on my netbook. They are then immediately available online, as well as organized in folders on my netbook. I label each folder by the location (Barcelona, Madrid, Gredos, etc.) so they are in chronological order and it's easy to find a particular picture I am looking for.
For pictures I take on my phone, I use the auto-upload from Google+.
Since I can easily take 500 RAW photographs per day on a 28 day trip my only recourse is to carry a small laptop with at least 500 gig memory and a backup portable hard drive. Having the laptop gives another advantage. I can cull and catalog the photographs each night. I can not imagine getting home after a month long trip and trying to remember the subject and where each photograph was taken.
Jim, my advice is to forget trying to upload your pictures to a website storage location. WiFi in Europe can be notoriously slow and unreliable in the hotels. It will be frustrating spending your time in the hotel re-establishing your link every 15-30 minutes to continue your downloads when the hotel WiFi drops you. If you take a lot of pictures it will take a while to download and you are never "really" sure you successfully transfered them.
This summer my family spent 5 weeks in Europe and between an Ipad and 3 Iphones we took 5000 pictures and videow totalling over 20GB. Like you I was concerned about losing the pictures if a phone was lost or stolen so I wanted something that did not take hours to backup and did not depend on an internet connection.
I highly recommend Airstash Plus. It is a WiFi thumbdrive that works well with the Ipad and Iphones. All you do is install the app, link to the wireless network from the thumbdrive and download. You can then check to make sure they all transfered. It also has a removeable SD card if you want to make a secondary backup to put in your moneybelt for safekeeping.
It was way more convenient using my own WiFi connection to download and I could do it when and where I chose to. For example, when we had an hour or two on a train I'd just link each cell phone to Airstash and download while we traveled instead up staying up late in the hotel.
Key featres: faxt download, removeable SD cards, small, USB charging, works with Iphones, not reliant on hotel WiFi, comes with 32GB card, peace of mind, and its cheap.
Hopefully this helps
Jon
Jim, I forgot to answer your App question.
The apps I found most usefull were Skype, local weather, translator, and a really cool photo app called 360. It allowed me to take a 360 degree photo of the inside of buildings. Its great being able to swipe your finger and move the picture up/down/left/right to see all angles in the Pantheon, or the view in any direction atop the Acropolis hill. My parents can't travel any more, but they thought these photos were the closest to being there especially when displayed on a TV and being able to look around as if they were there.
Jon
Jim, I forgot to answer your App question.
The apps I found most usefull were Skype, local weather, translator, and a really cool photo app called 360. It allowed me to take a 360 degree photo of the inside of buildings. Its great being able to swipe your finger and move the picture up/down/left/right to see all angles in the Pantheon, or the view in any direction atop the Acropolis hill. My parents can't travel any more, but they thought these photos were the closest to being there especially when displayed on a TV and being able to look around as if they were there.
Jon
As others have stated, we usually just store the memory card somewhere secure. If there is opportunity to upload photos, it goes to Shutterfly (which then makes it super easy to create the photobooks that I love to do after each trip). Although no personal experience, I have friends who happily and easily use Dropbox.
For my own photos, I use SmugMug and it works quite well for me. Most of the sites (Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa) are all pretty similar in the what to have to offer. I like the flexibility of SmugMug, and as Ken stated above, there is virtually no limit to what you can upload. You do have to pay an annual membership, but it is worth the money, for me.
I have also used DropBox, and there is a brief story here... Last year, my friend was visiting for a month from Freiburg, Germany, and he had taken hundreds of photos over the course of the month, alternating between two memory cards, but had not backed up any of his photo. Several days before the end of his trip, he turned his camera on and his card had failed. We took the card out and tried to read it on my laptop with no luck. We brought the card to the local camera shop and left it with them, and again no luck. He ended up taking the card to a data recovery service, where he had to pay substantially (I believe it was close to $400) to recover his photos. It took several weeks. So before I placed the recovered photo disk in the mail to him in Germany, I used DropBox to transfer the photos to my friend. Because of the size limit (2gb) it was necessary to send the files in three "batches". Moral of the story is: backup you memory card if the photos are important to you. Memory cards can fail...
DropBox worked very well. But, unless you have someone at home who will be transferring them to your home computer, the size limit of DropBox doesn't work for large numbers of photos while you are traveling (IMO).
Google has actually been phasing out Picasa, incorpoating aspects of it into both Google Drive and Google Plus. Everyone's gotta be socially networked, I guess. One nice thing about using Google products, however, is the latest version of Android will automatically back up any pictures taken with my smartphone to my Google Drive folder, once my phone is within range of a trusted WiFi connection. I don't even have to do anything to have all my photos backed up.
I know this doesn't help Jim, but maybe Apple offers a similar service since they're in such competition with Google these days?
Otherwise, DropBox is so easy to use, and you can also have it automatically back up when within WiFi range from the app.
I am thankful for the suggestions to use multiple, smaller capacity cards rather than one big one that might be cheaper per GB to protect photos. Also for Bob, several years ago I went out and purchased a Canon HS 260 camera (now replaced by a 280) that puts a GEO tag on every photo I take so that I at least have a clue as to where I took the photo. My wife and I are about to purchase an Apple iPad mini Retina and an Apple iPad Air so we will have to get instructions on how to download photos to each (if possible) as a back up. Thanks to all for all of the information.
"...I know this doesn't help Jim, but maybe Apple offers a similar
service since they're in such competition with Google these days?..."
By default Ipads/Iphones/Itouch will automatically upload photos to Apple's ICloud.com service. But like everything Apple getting additional storage space is expensive. Functionally Google Drive is an exact copy of Dropbox but it has the added benefit of 5gb of free storage compared to Dropbox's measly 2GB.
As Michael mentioned, iCloud automatically stores your photos when your iPad is connected to wifi. Just be sure you have it turned on. 5GB of storage are free. Unless you're shooting a great number of large file photos that should be adequate. If not an additional 10GB is $20.
Problem is that the free 5GB of storage Apple provides has to share space with other items that the device also uploads to Icloud like calendars, contacts, email, notes, and the system backup which takes a large chunk of space.
I've had my iPad for two years and have less than a gig in iCloud. That includes numerous photos and apps like Pages, TomTom GPS, Kindle, etc. 5G is a lot of space.
When you have an iPad and iPhone the free space in the cloud fills up faster, because the two devices are synced. At least that's what happened widen I synced mine.
There is some need for clarification to really answer this question.
First of all, there is a HUGE file size difference between photos taken on a 16-24 mega-pixel good quality camera and an iPhone or iPad-like device. Sure, you can take many iPhone photos and upload them to the cloud or whatever and it won't add up to much space - and won't take forever over the low-cost hotel wifi system. But anyone taking photos with a large file size will fill up that space in a big hurry and definitely will encounter major frustration with wifi availability and speed. I'm no professional photographer, but I will take at least 16GB worth of photos each week I'm on a trip.
There are probably at least a dozen wifi/cloud/internet based solutions to the question you asked, but they are all subject to wifi availability, speed, and reliability. I would not go that route. The lowest-tech, easiest solution is to stick with multiple smaller SD cards and switch them out, assuring that if you suffer the 1 in 100+ chance that a card goes bad on you, you only lose a small portion of your photos. The next best solution is to download the content of the SD cards to another device you have with you. Some people use cheap netbook-style laptops (as little as $250), some opt for a much nicer computer, but still small and light, like the Macbook Air 11" ($999) and some opt for a tablet device with an appropriate amount of free memory. If you would be traveling with one of these devices anyway (as many people do), that is by far the best option.
So using the $29 camera connection kit, you can import the SD card files to your iPad and just keep them there. No need to transfer them via internet anywhere unless you envision taking more than about 12GB worth of photos and your iPad is the minimum 16GB of memory. I'll be taking a trip to Istanbul in March taking a lot of photos and my iPad (with 32GB of memory). The iPad will leave home with about 2GB worth of basics on it and about 20GB worth of movies I might want to watch. As the days pass and I watch a few movies, I'll delete them, freeing up more space for photo downloads. By the time the trip is nearing its end, I will have as much as 26GB of photos on the iPad and just a couple of movies left for the plane ride home. Of course, I'll never delete the photos from my SD cards until I have then duplicated several times at home. But saving them in two locations (SD card and iPad) while away is safe enough, IMO.
