Emailing photos from Internet cafes

I'm curious: how do you email your pictures back home? Attachments over 15 MB really cause problems for me and I can't receive them. Most places I've been to only allow smaller attachments than even that. And that doesn't really give room for that many pictures.

Some internet cafes allow it, some do not.

As for the keyboard, some cafes have 1 or 2 designated US keyboards. Ex. in Paris at one of the RS recommended internet cafes, they had 1 laptop that had this keyboard, at a larger (and cheaper) cafe I found on my own in the Latin Quarter, all terminals could be switched over by simply using the toolbar to select the English option (very easy to use if you know how to type without looking at the keyboard - if you use the hunt & peck method, won't work for you). The staff at the cafe can show you how this option works if they offer it.

I take along my small (2.9#) notebook computer to, among other things, store my picture files. Half of all the small B&Bs that I stayed at in Germany in October had Wifi, so it was a simple matter to email photos back home.

On a previous trip, without Wifi capabilities, I used Internet cafes (2). One had a card reader and read my files for me to a network drive, from which I could retrieve them. Another had USB connection on each computer so I could read my jump drive.

As for the keyboards, I didn't find any US keyboards where I was. In fact, I didn't find many Internet cafes; I think they are going away, except in the most touristy places, because most Germans are getting their own home connections. Of the four I used, two only had 1 computer, one had 2, so there weren't a lot of computer on which to have options. I found the German keyboards pretty easy to use. The @ key was in a different place. The worst thing is that the Z and Y are interchanged. That drove me crayz!

Well, Beatrix, to start with, I only take pictures at 1024x768 (sometimes smaller), because that is the largest size I can display on my computer screen, and that's what I do with my pictures. Only occasionally have I ever made a print, and that was at 4x6, to send to a relative who didn't have a computer. A 1024x768 pictures prints fine at 4x6.

So, for me, anything over 1024x768 just wastes memory space to store and battery power to save. 1024x768 with 16.7 million colors takes only a third of a megabyte.

I could send home 45 pictures without exceeding the 15 MB limit.

Actually, I only send a few pictures home as attachments to my emails, kind of like sending postcards. The rest of my pictures I bring home stored in my notebook computer.

I have, on occasion, uploaded pictures directly to my online travel journal and then dealt with them (captions, order, positioning, etc) when I got back. The journal isn't public until I'm ready for people to see it, so they just sit there until then. I, like Lee, keep my pics to a small size because I also only rarely make prints.

Hi Lee,

Well, we just have different styles of photography ;-) I use all of the 10 Mega Pixels I can get out of my camera. I often end up cropping shots extensively. If I started out at a lower resolution there wouldn't be enough left in those cases to display on a screen or print. Oh, and hubby now has started to set our network up in a way that pics can be displayed on our 60" tv screen - you'd better have some reasonable resolution for that.

To be able to use an USB device in an internet cafee will be up to them. Some internet cafe might not allo that because viruses can be spread thru usb devices.
I am not sure if they have US keyboards in the internet cafes, but you should be fine using the European ones.
You also can get extra memory cards, instead of a reader. They really come inexpensive nowadays.
You can get them from ebay or buy.com for much less than in specialized stores.

When we were in Spain, we blogged our trip and had no problem using the internet cafe. Some of their PCs didn't have a card reader, so obviously we couldn't upload our photos.

I found posting on the blog was easier than emailing pictures. Not only do you not have to mass email everyone, your family/friends can look at your blog at their convenience.

The internet cafe I found in Rome actually had a little slot memory card reader. Popped the memory card out of the camera and into the computer and voila!

The keyboard...was mostly 'normal' but had a few extra characters and things in the "wrong" place. Drove me slightly nuts the first time I used it, but I managed by just typing slow and looking at the keys rather than relying on it being standard.

Google has an upload web storage site for photos that I am very impressed with from a viewer's end. My son and DIL are on 5 month around the world honeymoon and frequently up load all of their photos from the journey. They started in Japan and are now in Turkey and are uploading hundreds of pictures to the google site. Don't know how difficult that is but I am impressed by the end product when you go to view the pictures.

You can always upload your photos to Photobucket - its pretty much unlimited storage space. www.photobucket.com

And then you can link to the photos or save them to your home computer once you return.