Portable Photo Drives offer practical photo backup solutions for photographers on the road
As much as I enjoyed shooting film during my travels back in the day, hauling around all those gallon sized Ziploc freezer bags full of film canisters got to be kind of a pain. Especially after 9/11 when airport security procedures went into overdrive.
Shooting digitally while traveling presents different challenges, namely how to back up and store your images during your trip. Chances are, if you’re on a long enough trip, or if you tend to shoot a lot of images, which we all tend to do with digital, sooner or later, you’ll probably fill up all your cards. Then what?
Portable media storage drives are a practical and increasingly popular option with photographers who go on the road. They’re small, lightweight, they take up much less room than a laptop, they backup right from most card formats, as well as to other USB drives, and they allow you to store and review thousands of images, which frees up your memory cards in case you run out of space. Most of them also store MP3 files as well. They’re fairly rugged, which offers additional piece of mind, and they fit right inside your camera bag, backpack or jacket pocket.
Keeping the drive on your person at all times can be insurance against losing all of your images in case your camera bag gets lost or stolen.
There are quite a few of these devices on the market, here’s a rundown of the most popular full sized, larger capacity models.
Epson P Series Multimedia Storage Drive: The Epsons are probably the most used media drives. They have high quality 4” LCD screens for viewing your photos, jog wheels for quick scrolling through your collection and built in software that allows you to print right from the drive. They store RAW and JPEG files and come in three different models: the P-3000 40GB, the P-6000 80GB and the P-7000 160GB.
Digital Foci Picture Porter Digital Photo Manager: The Picture Porter comes in two sizes, 250GB and 500GB, and they come with RCA cables for TV or projector hookup, headphones for listening to stored music, carrying case, wrist strap, and they store RAW, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, MP3, WMA, AAC and MPEG video.
Jobo Giga Vu Extreme: Coming in two models, 120GB and 160GB, they feature 3.7” LCD displays with 640×480 resolution, the ability to store RAW and JPEG format, as well as MP3, and MPEG video, both analog and digital output. They feature 20MB/second transfer rates, and PictBridge compatibility for printing photos without the need of a computer.
Memory Kick Media Center: These come in two sizes, 320GB and 500GB and they are compatible with most standard card formats. With fairly fast transfer rates (1GB in under 3 minutes) they allow for quick backup of your images. You can also upload photos from the device to a memory card or copy images from one card to another. It supports most audio and video file types and can accommodate up to 4 cards at the same time.
Nexto DI eXteme: Nexto portable storage drives are highly rated and come in four sizes, 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and 500GB. They are designed more as drives than media viewers, as they only have a 2.5” backlight screen, but they have fast transfer rates and SATA hard disk drive storage. Weighing in at just over a half pound, the Nexto Drives are among the smaller and more compact options the market for their high capacity.
Sanho HyperDrive Portable Memory Card Reader: The HyperDrives range from 160GB to 500GB and they feature high resolution 4.8” wide LCD displays with 1:1 pixel decoding technology, the largest screens of any portable drive. They support image formats only, RAW and JPEG, and feature 66MB/sec transfer rates. They include histogram display, gamma and color temperature adjustment and easy image browsing software with folder and subfolder structure as well as an “Add to Favorites Option.”
Wolverine ESP 80GB Portable Multimedia Storage and Player: This is truly a multimedia device. In addition to offering media storage, MP3, and video playback capabilities, the Wolverine also features an FM tuner and recorder, the ability to read text files, video recording and line-in audio recording. With long battery life, the Wolverine can transfer up to 20GB or play 13 hours of music or 4 hours of video on a single charge.
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Dan Bailey is a professional adventure, outdoor and travel photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska. Follow his own blog at danbaileyphoto.com/blog and see his daily updates at facebook.com/danbaileyphoto.
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