Best way to take "some" photos with me on the go?

This is coming from me trying to rework my workflow and backup strategy, which is:

- External SSD holds LR catalog, previews
- Desktop drive holds all RAW photos
- ^^ backed up to NAS
- ^^ backed up to remote NAS

I am also regularly traveling, and if I am doing any LR/photography on the go:
- Bring laptop+SSD with me
- Import to either laptop or SSD
- Back up to 2x portable hard drives
- Upon return, move imported photos on to desktop's hard drive (where they'll be bakced up twice)
- Delete copies off 2x portable drives

I've (re)built smart previews for my entire library, so now my SSD drive becomes more useful where I can edit all my photos on the go. I've only tried it out once so far, but apart from a couple quirks/bugs it seems to work really well and is faster. Problem I encountered rather quickly is when I needed to work on these photos outside of LR (photoshop).

How could I make some of these photos at least "temporarily" available to me on the go? My first thought was to store recent photos on the SSD and only offload them to the desktop drive when done with them, but a) Extra source to backup which is annoying but not impossible; and b) As a landscape photographer I find I jump through age of photos more frequently, rather than say finishing a portrait or wedding session and moving on... so this doesn't really work so well.

I'd ideally also want to have the photos available without having to "relocate" them because then I end up losing the folder structure they were put into, which would make re-organizing them quite difficult and backups creating duplicate copies.

Sorry for the word barf - but any ideas for my weird potentially unique situation?

I'm not sure this answers your question, but hear me out.

I keep everything (raw, edits, library) on my desktop HDD. I have a second internal HDD as daily backup. I have 3 external HDD as rotating backup (two are always updated at the same time). Soooooo... at any given time, I have 4 copies of everything.

If I needed to take some photos with me, I'd take an external HDD and have EVERYTHING available. A simple DOS command line:

xcopy (external drive\*.*) (primary internal drive) /d

will copy everything modified on the field trip back to my primary HDD. That includes any new files generated, any modified previews, and anything else LR stores in the library. The only catch is that I have to keep the file/directory structure the same on all drives. That is pretty simple since the file structure on all my backups is generated from my primary HDD.

Bassat wrote in post #18625765
I'm not sure this answers your question, but hear me out.

I keep everything (raw, edits, library) on my desktop HDD. I have a second internal HDD as daily backup. I have 3 external HDD as rotating backup (two are always updated at the same time). Soooooo... at any given time, I have 4 copies of everything.

If I needed to take some photos with me, I'd take an external HDD and have EVERYTHING available. A simple DOS command line:

xcopy (external drive\*.*) (primary internal drive) /d

will copy everything modified on the field trip back to my primary HDD. That includes any new files generated, any modified previews, and anything else LR stores in the library. The only catch is that I have to keep the file/directory structure the same on all drives. That is pretty simple since the file structure on all my backups is generated from my primary HDD.

I suppose having a large "portable" drive as one of my syncs works, though I don't love the idea of moving around what my SOURCE is - even as you say there are ways to copy changes back to the "original source". Also not sure lugging around a big 3.5" enclosure drive is all that reasonable. Hmmm!

kaitlyn2004 wrote in post #18625843
I suppose having a large "portable" drive as one of my syncs works, though I don't love the idea of moving around what my SOURCE is - even as you say there are ways to copy changes back to the "original source". Also not sure lugging around a big 3.5" enclosure drive is all that reasonable. Hmmm!

My external backups are on 2.5" drives. Two of them fit in a shirt pocket.

In my case, I've recently struggled between buying yet another external hard drive, or getting an online storage service account. After much debate -between the voices in my head- I decided to go with Online Storage as an additional form of backup and quick access. So far it's been three months, and I have been extremely happy.

I went to Dropbox and opened an account for about $10 per month. With 1TB of space, was able to back up my 13 year old External Hard Drive and upload 350GB of archived photos. The beauty is that -without necessarily syncing them to any other device- I can access all of these from my phone, my Unix box, my work computer, or any other outlet with Internet Access.

They're really good about letting me know of any payment issues (I once had to change ccard numbers) without restricting access, and was able to fix it immediately.

Realized that for the money, it is as accessible as anything I could ever use. Even now for instance, as I work on my latest website gallery, I uploaded the folder with images to Dropbox, and I can edit them from my laptop on the go, or the comfortable Desktop at home, without having multiple copies of the same file, or having to carry a device.

I'm sure it's not perfect and that there are limitations and cons. So far though its worked great for me.

Hope this helps!

PhotoJourno wrote in post #18639751
In my case, I've recently struggled between buying yet another external hard drive, or getting an online storage service account. After much debate -between the voices in my head- I decided to go with Online Storage as an additional form of backup and quick access. So far it's been three months, and I have been extremely happy.

I went to Dropbox and opened an account for about $10 per month. With 1TB of space, was able to back up my 13 year old External Hard Drive and upload 350GB of archived photos. The beauty is that -without necessarily syncing them to any other device- I can access all of these from my phone, my Unix box, my work computer, or any other outlet with Internet Access.

They're really good about letting me know of any payment issues (I once had to change ccard numbers) without restricting access, and was able to fix it immediately.

Realized that for the money, it is as accessible as anything I could ever use. Even now for instance, as I work on my latest website gallery, I uploaded the folder with images to Dropbox, and I can edit them from my laptop on the go, or the comfortable Desktop at home, without having multiple copies of the same file, or having to carry a device.

I'm sure it's not perfect and that there are limitations and cons. So far though its worked great for me.

Hope this helps!

I guess it depends on your internet speeds, and how much you shoot. My download speeds are often not much better than 3-4 Mb/s and uploads are often under 1 Mb/s. I also tend to shoot a lot of images at an airshow, the one I went to the last weekend of May I filled 59GB of assorted sized cards on each of the two days. Thats more than six thousand images over the two days. I need to get them off the card, and on to at least two separate drives before I even think about culling images. With images shot out to 600mm, and often needing a 50% crop on top, along with requiring shutter speeds as low as 1/10s the hit rate can be pretty low. So for me online backup is not really useful.

Alan