You could just buy lots of memory cards and keep changing them. This isn't a bad plan for a trip of a week or two but for 4 months? Even if you only fill one memory card/week, you have a dozen of these to loose, get out of order, fumble with by the time you get home. Not a crazy solution but probably not the best. The advantage of this solution is that you don't need a computer. Adding your laptop into the solution gives you more options and security.
If your camera shoots jpg's that aren't too large, then you might be able to get by with a few thumb drives in which to copy your photos. This is much more manageable than a dozen memory cards. It is easier to keep them safe and in order. If this is an option, it has the advantage that you can keep a backup thumb drive that is a duplicate of the main one that helps insure that you get home with all your valuable photos.
If, however, you are like me and you use a camera that generates large files, you have to think bigger. I have found that Western Digital makes a portable 2 TB (that's 2,000 GB!) hard drive that connects to the USB port on your laptop. There is no need to worry about power converters since it gets its power through the USB connection.
This gives me a place to dump all my photos. Of course, I'll need two if I want to backup the data, but at about $140 each, this is not a crazy thing to consider.
Now,you may enough space on the hard drive in your lepton, but then again you might not. How many pictures will you make? I don't know. On a recent week-long vacation I cam home with about 1200 photos. A quick check on my external hard drive shows that I generated about 80 GB of files in a week. Will I take pictures at this rate while in London? Doesn't seem crazy since every class has an outing every week along with trips to Edinburgh, Stonehenge, Bath, Stratford and Paris.
So let's make an estimate. Let's be generous and assume that I'll store 100GB of photos every week for 12 weeks. This means that I need to store 1200GB=1.2TB of photos. A 2TB drive is a good guess for having plenty of room and not having to worry about running out. This, of course, doesn't include the photos I'll take once the semester ends and I'm traveling a bit in Europe. If you plan this as well, include it in your storage plan.
One thing that will help, is to make an initial editing pass through your photos when you transfer them off of the memory card. Delete the ones that are out of focus, over or under exposed badly, where the camera moved (oops!), or your camera wasn't really pointed at anything interesting. This might be 10% of the total. This gets you more space and save you having to do this when you get home and just want to show photos to friends and family.
It gets a bit messier to plan for storage if you also shoot videos. High Definition (HD) videos are 1920X1080 pixels so each frame is about 2 MB. At 24 frames/sec we get and about 5 mB/sec. This is a little less than 3 GB/minute. A standard video shot at 1280X720p would be around 1.3 GB/min. Overestimating the space by a factor of two doesn't seem so crazy now.
If you have ideas for storing photos that have worked for you, share them in the comments.
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