Photos on the Go: How to Back Up Your Photos While Traveling

Storing Photos While Traveling: What’s the Problem, Exactly?

Honestly, we never really paid much attention to backing up photos while traveling. Most of the time we were only on the road for a week or two. We’d just pack enough memory cards and trust that they wouldn’t break. That was probably a little naive, but thankfully it always worked out fine.

But since we started working location-independently — meaning we’re not just away for a few weeks but traveling year-round — that approach is no longer an option for us. Before our first 6-month trip through Southeast Asia, we dove deep into the subject.

Since we save our photos in RAW format, a single image is 20 or 30 megabytes. Over six months, that adds up to a massive amount of data — we probably would have had to bring an entire box of memory cards.

Even if we weren’t traveling with carry-on only, a box of memory cards would definitely not make our packing list.

On top of that, memory cards aren’t the most reliable storage medium. Those tiny things are easy to lose, and as we recently had to find out firsthand, a memory card can just die on you. But more on that later.

So yeah — you need a solid plan for backing up travel photos. And that’s exactly what we’re going to walk you through now.

Our Gear for Backing Up Photos on the Road

For saving photos while traveling, we rely on these five things:

• Laptop: We use MacBooks, but any laptop works just fine.
• Memory cards: On our trips we carry eight 32 GB SD cards. SD cards are available almost everywhere in the world — even in small supermarkets across Asia — so you can always grab replacements quickly.
• External hard drives: We use these SSD drives from SanDisk and are really happy with them.
• Adobe Lightroom: Lightroom is our photo editing software of choice. Not only is it great for editing RAW files, it also helps us manage, organize, and — most importantly — cull our photos. We use the monthly Creative Cloud subscription.
• Online storage: No matter how many computers, hard drives, and SD cards we have with us — if our luggage gets stolen, water-damaged, or destroyed, everything is gone. That’s why cloud backup is so important to us. We back up our photos online using services like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Our Workflow for Saving Photos While Traveling

Over time we’ve settled into a pretty well-defined workflow for sorting and saving photos on the road.

Shoot with intention

One important step happens before we even take a photo: thinking! From personal experience, we know how exhausting it is to sort through 5,000 photos after a week — so we’ve shifted toward taking fewer photos.

Whaaat? We haven’t lost it, we promise. We just know ourselves too well. If the pile gets too big, a lot of photos would go unsorted and unedited forever.

That’s why we now shoot even more intentionally than before. We think more carefully about how we want to frame a subject and don’t just shoot randomly. Honestly, you shouldn’t do that anyway.

The result? Far fewer photos on our memory cards at the end of the day — and the ones we do take are simply better.

Of course, it still happens every now and then that we both come back in the evening with 300 photos each on our cards. That leads us right to the next step.

Review and cull photos regularly

Step 2 is still the one that gives us the most trouble, simply because we tend to slack off on it. Our goal is to review and cull each day’s photos every evening, or at least the following day.

Sometimes that works pretty well, but it still happens that we let photos pile up for over a week and then find ourselves staring at a massive mountain of images.

Here’s how we approach the sorting: we import all the photos from a day — or a week — into Lightroom and copy them onto one of our external hard drives in the process.

Then we go through all the photos together and cut ruthlessly. Basti is usually a bit more ruthless than Jenny, but in the end fewer than half the photos make the cut.

We do the culling using the handy flags in Lightroom, by the way. All rejected images get a black flag and are deleted right after sorting.

We don’t just remove the photos from Lightroom — we delete them directly from the hard drive as well. That way we need significantly less storage space overall.

Two backups are better than one

In the next step, we copy all the photos from one external hard drive to the other, so we always have two complete backups with us. If one drive gives out, we still have everything on the other.

Three backups are even better

But if both hard drives fail or get stolen, we’re completely out of luck. Figuratively speaking.

That’s why we also back up all our sorted, approved photos online — this is the cornerstone of any solid travel photo backup strategy.

There are plenty of providers where you can get online storage. We store our photos on our own server, so they’re always safe and accessible from anywhere in the world.

Uploading large image files isn’t possible everywhere, of course. In Thailand it works reasonably well; in the Philippines, not so much. With the internet connection there, we’re happy if we can check our emails every once in a while.

Not everyone has their own server, of course. But there are plenty of services where you can get online storage for free or very little money.

The best-known options are probably Google Drive and Dropbox, both of which we use ourselves.

Both offer free storage: Dropbox gives you 2 GB and Google Drive gives you 15 GB. That’s not much for RAW files, of course, but you can purchase additional storage from both providers.

With Dropbox you get 1 TB of storage for $9.99 per month or $99 per year. Google Drive also charges $9.99 per month for 1 TB.

Bottom Line: There’s No Such Thing as Absolute Photo Security

With this workflow, we feel pretty confident. Of course, photos can still get lost before we’ve had a chance to upload them to our online storage. In that case, we’re just out of luck.

But in Asia, much more security than this simply isn’t possible — upload speeds there are usually reminiscent of the 56k modem era. So far everything has worked out fine and we hope it stays that way. In Europe, backing up travel photos online is considerably easier.

Side Note: Protecting Memory Cards

We mentioned at the beginning of this article that we’ve already had the unpleasant experience of a broken memory card. It really isn’t fun.

Some photos suddenly had strange colorful stripes across them, and we were already worried that Jenny’s camera was dying. After some research, though, we identified the memory card as the culprit — and apparently, this kind of thing is not at all uncommon.

Memory cards are sensitive, and things can go wrong. With a few precautions, though, you can at least significantly reduce the risk:

Tip 1: Don’t Just Toss Memory Cards in Your Bag

OK, this one should really go without saying — though we ourselves weren’t exactly careful with memory cards in the past. When you buy memory cards, there’s often a small plastic case included. Use it!

If you want something a bit nicer, or prefer one case for all your memory cards instead of a bunch of individual ones, a dedicated memory card holder is the way to go.

We can recommend this one: Memory Card Storage Case.

Tip 2: Never Delete Photos Directly on Your Camera

Most of the time you check a photo on the camera’s display right after pressing the shutter. If it’s crooked, blurry, too bright, too dark, or poorly composed, the delete button gets pressed fast.

Unless it’s absolutely necessary: don’t. It’s better to cull your photos on a computer instead. Deleting photos directly on the camera increases the risk of data errors.

Tip 3: Always Format Your Memory Card After Inserting It

After you’ve transferred your photos to your computer or external hard drive, you should completely clear your memory card.

To minimize the risk of data errors, format your memory card every time after reinserting it into the camera.

One word of caution: always make sure you’ve backed up all your photos first. Once the memory card is formatted, it’s empty!