Travel Photography. How do you manage it? My latest method.

For years I have tried various methods to store, back up and organize photos while I am traveling. This is my latest and easily most successful way to do it.
I travel regularly and managing a travel process is important to me. If you have ideas on it and/or other systems, would you care to share them?
My gear. I use Sony cameras with SD cards. I'll discuss lenses and travel in another post, eventually.
After many years I have swapped from Windows to Mac because of travel and one particular Mac. The 13 inch Airbook. It has to be either the M1 or M2 model. Previous models didn't have the power I need. I can take that Mac plus my camera and a Kindle comfortably within weight limits in my small backpack on a plane.
The 13inch Airbook M1or M2 amazed me. It is small and lightweight. It has a very good screen, keyboard and trackpad. The big deal however is its power and battery life. Even with just the base configuration with 8gig of ram, the way that ram is managed makes Photoshop and Lightroom processing fast and smooth. I don't think more Ram is needed unless you do a lot of video. There is no fan- it runs cool which indicates it uses little power. I get 12 or more hours on battery without trying hard. This means I can easily do work on images while on buses etc.
I boost the memory to 2tb with a Samsung external SSD. I also have a high speed plug in card reader.
I have full versions of Photoshop, Lightroom and Topaz installed on the Mac,
Each night I download the day's shooting to the external SSD. It goes into a file structure that slots straight back into my desktop set up when I get home. When downloading new images into I have LR set to not download duplicates of images already in the computer. This means I can keep using the same sd card until it is full, this usually takes a couple of weeks. LR only accepts the new images I have shot. Each night or on buses etc, I go through the shots and cull them. I put a reject against any shot I know I don't want to keep. But I don't delete it. By not deleting at this stage, the next download wont try to load that image again because it only downloads images not on the computer. I keep full Sd cards somewhere separate and safe. They are my backups. Once I'm home, I delete all rejected images from the computer in one hit. Once everything is on my home computer it does an auto back up and then I reformat the SD cards.
In spare time while traveling I go through the shots to begin selecting and post processing. PhotoShop and Topaz are available at the touch of a button if I want them as part of this.
Sometimes I shoot panoramas to be stitched. I always do the stitching later that day because I lose track of series of images that I took with the intent to stitch them later. The Mac M1 easily handles large multi image stitching and Topaz processing of those huge images if I think that is required. My old Windows desktop machine took far longer to do these tasks.
I also like to get a lot of the preliminary sorting and processing done while I'm traveling and the day's events are fresh in my mind. A few weeks land many images later and I find I have often lost track of what I was trying to do when I took a particular shot. Besides, I'm a;ways busy when I get home and reviewing and processing the collection becomes a weight rather than part of the day's excitement.
If you go to the current weeks C&C forum on DPRevived you will find some of my shots that have been through this process.
dprevived.com/t/wednesday-cc-no-theme-thread-795-revived-015-on-2023-07-12/4569/

Of the many trips I have done, the above set up was easily the best solution I have found. So far.

Hi Alan. I was waiting for someone to come in with a method that uses downloads via wi fi to somewhere or other.
At home I connect to a NAS (QNAP) that backs up to the clouds. I wait until the NAS has the photos and has sent them off to the cloud storage before I reformat the sd cards.
I decided against a download while I'm traveling solution because I found the wi-fi links where I stay and travel were often non existent or very slow and I am downloading large FF RAW files.
But this is a personal thing. I like to check them and do initial culling and PP as I go while I am still revved up about what I have been shooting. From past experience, my enthusiasm fades after a few days, especially when it is a longish trip. Generally I'll cull something close to 50% of my shots before I get home. Maybe I did the same shot from a several different angles etc. What I am left with when I get home is shots I have made decisions about and I'm feeling good about them so going through them all becomes a pleasure rather than a chore. That's just me.
The trip I just finished was a little different. I found it considerably easier to find fast wi fi in most places I stayed. Perhaps if that had been my previous experience, I might have given more thought to a download solution?

We select our photo gear depending on the travel restrictions (plane, car, region etc etc)
We do use Lowepro and Tamrac Anvil bagpacks for our gear
I'll always try to fit one analog camera with a few films, which also means asking for a different approach at airports with no CT scanning and a manual check.
and always one of our laptops (15 or 17 inch) is going to be packed with two external USB 3 SSDdrives (2TB each)
Those drives will be used as a daily backup and stored in different bags/suitcases.
Daily routine: take pictures 😂
Copying and checking them (raws/jpgs) on the laptop, remove the rubbish ones, process the good ones
Back them up to the external drives.
Sleep and repeat above 😁

Don't need any online service so we can be off-grid for a while.

My current system is to download images via a card reader to an iPad specifically provisioned for that purpose. From the iPad, assuming my travel is “on grid”, the images are uploaded (as I sleep) to iCloud…from which they are automagically downloaded to my desktop machine at home and then sent on to another cloud provider for backup. I try to not reformat cards at all while traveling, but if necessary I don't do this until I've confirmed that the images have worked their way through the entire system. This works particularly well for me because I use Apple's iCloud Photo Library as my CMS, processing images using Photos, Raw Power, Photomator or Affinity according to my needs and wants. I am also a jpg shooter for better than 90% of my travel/reportage photography — though I do shoot RAW selectively.

If I’m going to need more storage, or I'm traveling offgrid, I use the iPad (or iPad Mini) to transfer images onto an external pocketable SSD drive as backup, and store that drive separately (as is feasible) from the vault containing the original “exposed” cards.

I use something similar but rely on an ipad for travel. I have Lightroom, Photoshop and various aps on the ipad, and download the photos nightly using a card reader. I cull and edit at will on the ipad but keep all images on the cards as my backup till I get home. If there's wifi along the way, I have Lightroom set up to send the images to the cloud, but if not they remain on the ipad until it can connect to the cloud. Once I'm home, I turn on my main computer and allow the two Lightroom's to talk to each other till the images migrate to their permanent home on my desktop system and appear in the LIghtroom Classic environment. Only when I am sure the photos are on my home photo disk and properly backed up do I delete them from Adobe cloud, the ipad, and the cards and halt the sync process. I'm basically using Adobe cloud as a temporary disk space to move images and edits.

Edit: I see jaberg uses an almost identical process!

Buy a pocket full of SD cards before I leave. They're cheap as chips. Treat them like film. When they're full, pop a new one in the camera, and carry on. It was good enough for film photography, it's good enough for digital. I've got a couple of spare batteries, if I want to fiddle with processing/raw conversion, I do it on the camera. Then blueteeth the image to the phone if I want to show it on social media. Which doesn't happen very often. I go on holidays/travel for relaxation & enjoyment. Not to impersonate a pack Mule by dragging half a photo lab around with me. So of late my G100 and a couple of tiny primes come for the ride. Always an ultrawide in there somewhere. Or maybe my 12-35mm f2.8 & the requisite ultrawide prime. Keep it small, compact, light and simple. Far more enjoyable that way.

When I travel I usually have my portable with me as being self employed I need to have a computer for work emergencies. I also have Capture one loaded for fun in the evenings. If not I just make sure I have plenty of cards with me.

When I travel and have decent WiFi access, I use my Macbook for downloading and reviewing images. I also mark the image folder to be backed up to Google Drive.
When traveling without WiFi, I use a 2TB SSD for backups using Carbon Copy Cloner.

I always travel with a WD my passport. About the size of a wallet and easy to carry. Most hotels have a business center with computers. Just download your images straight into this device. Easy peasey lemon squeezy.
WD Passport examples here:
www.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-my-passport-usb-3-0-hdd#WDBYVG0010BBK-WESN

Me too.

Everything gets “Imported” into LRM and I work, full create,”finish”. While that’s going on if I have good WiFi, the images are loading to the cloud and into LR (desktop) and are then pulled down into LRC (stored locally in my own file structure) when I return home.

Carrying only an iPad (and a cable/ card dongle or two) rather than a laptop is utterly liberating for me.

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I did a 3-week road trip with my older brother in June. The first couple of weeks were focused on visiting US national parks & monuments. The last week was more dedicated to visiting family, though we did end the trip in Springfield, Illinois doing Lincoln stuff.

In addition to my smartphone (729 photos), I brought my Nikon D500 and Fuji X-T20 cameras and lenses. I came home with 5,949 photos made with the ILCs.

Most nights at the hotel, the last thing I would do before going to sleep is import the photos to my Lightroom catalog. I brought my main computer, a Lenovo Legion laptop, on the trip for this very purpose.

Each photo shoot gets its own folder. I add keywords during import, for example: wyoming, yellowstone np, grand loop rd, wildlife, black bear, cinnamon. After import, I'd go into the Map module and drag the photos onto the spot where I'd made them. Finally, I'd go through the photos to mark my favorites.

Every photo that's marked for processing gets automatically added to a smart collection of photos waiting to be processed. I waited until I was home from the trip to do the processing and editing. It took about a week to make a full pass through the selects and to process 210 photos.

As I've been choosing samples from these to publish, I may do some touching up. But they're at least 90% of the way to finished.

I wasn't running any backups during the trip and I like to start a day with freshly formatted cards in my cameras. So, the photos resided on my 500GB internal SSD until I got home.

Once at home, one of the first things I did the following morning was to copy the folders of photos to the external drive that serves as my local backup. That took awhile. I also got the laptop and my external drives back on the network so Backblaze could resume backing up my photos to the cloud.

I've been sharing photos from that trip in a series of posts in the Nature & Wildlife forum under the title, "2023 Epic Summer Road Trip." Check it out.

You should try something like my G100 plus a couple (or 3) small, light, large aperture Panasonic Leica primes. The whole lot weighs a touch over 800 grams. Now that's liberating.

That would be true for me if I wasn’t already using just an iPhone 14 Pro Max for travel photography (and most other things). Spent 5-weeks on Spain with only my iPhone. Wonderfully liberating for me. It is even more liberating than an iPad instead of a computer on the road.

How are you finding the 9mm ? I have the 15mm F/1.7 and the tiny and much loved { by me 😀} 20mm. Looking at a lot of samples from the 9mm soft corners and flare looked to be potential problems . Having a peek at uncorrected images from the 9mm show a lot of distortion the correction of this I suspect is a culprit in the soft corners. I was interested in the lens but not convinced so far

www.dpreview.com/sample-galleries/1926315964/panasonic-leica-9mm-f1-7-sample-gallery/4903868435

I'm a phone camera hater. For good reason. For me anyway. I love shooting wide. Like 16-18mm 135 format equivalent wide. A very large % of my shots are at less than 10mm (m4/3)
I've also been down the screen only/no EVF road, I persevered for a couple of years, will not do it again. My G100's have fabulous EVF's.
Ergonomics, & manual controls. Phones have none of that. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Diddly squat. If I sat down and tried to design something as horrible as I could muster for shooting photos with, I don't think I could design anything worse than a phone. I snap the odd shot for work purposes with my phone, that's it. Absolutely zero enjoyment derived from the exercise.
I understand that many people love their phone cameras, I'm not one of them. Not in the slightest.