I need a cheap way to down load photos on a trip.

I'm going on vacation next week and don't know the most cost effective way to store my pictures until I get home. I have thought of resurrecting my Dell latitude which will cost about $200.00 and buying a external hardrive and Lightroom. Around $500.00 total. Any ideas? Thanks

We got two Seagate 1TB USB 2.0 drives from Costco in Alparetta for around $120 each. These are small 2.5" drives. They packed well into my pro roller x200 bag and worked just fine for our recent 2 week trip.

I would definitely suggest using LR (3 was just released) to bring in the CR2 raw files as DNG format, and put them in folders on the external drive. As you get time (such as on a filght back home, cull).

When you get home, let LR on your home PC import the folders.

So I can down load straight to the Seagates? I know nothing about such things so excuse the simple questions.

Take your laptop and upload pictures to it

Or just get a few memory cards

look into one of the asus netbooks. very small, can run light room, and you can usually find them pretty cheap in the refurb section of microcenter (less than $200)

I find mine quite useful for 'temporary' storage. with about 270gigs of storage, after the OS and lightroom is on there, and a good battery life... <shrug> seems to be a good solution.

10" screen is just big enough for you to sort, but not tempt you into wanting to do any serious editing.

How long will you be gone?

How big is your media storage card(s)?

If you have a large media card or 2, just use them. Every night, go through and delete the bad shots. If you come close to filling both of them up, buy a card(s) as you need it on your trip.

Otherwise, spend the money to get your Dell Latitude fixed, but depends on how old it is. If it's very old, it might be more cost effective to buy a new one or even a netbook, as suggested. Or get one of those media backup devices, which will take up less room than a laptop/netbook, but may cost about the same.

You do not need Lightroom or any other program simply to copy RAW files onto a harddrive...simple Windows file copy does that just fine. Get yourself a 250GB external USB-connect harddrive (like WD Passport) for only about $50, and bring your existing Dell laptop...you only need a PC Card CF adapter or a USB reader to plug the CF card into for transferring. Then you copy from CF to internal harddrive, and then make a second copy to the external harddrive, so that you have two copies before you format and re-use your CF card.

If you don't have the CF space to get you throught the whole trip, you're gonna have to make an investment. If you're looking for the cheapest way, more/bigger CF cards is the way to go. It's also the smallest way to go if you don't really want to lug a laptop.

Lugging a laptop isn't a bad thing though. Load the Digital Photo Professional software that came with your cameras. That will let your preview raw images. You can use that for downloads as well, or just copy the files from the card to a hard drive.

If you feel like you'll have some time to do some editing, then buy and load more sophisticated software. But you're on vacation. You don't want to spend your evenings in a hotel room on the computer. Save that for when you get back.

But whatever you decide, look at it as an investment. Don't buy something just for the trip. Get something you'll get some mileage out of when you get back home.

I guess what we need to hear is the entire workflow. If just do a copy of the raw files to a portable HD...OK. Ideally do it to two drives for safety. But now you get home and what will you use move, catalog and process the files?

What I was trying to say is if you have LR on both your portable and a home computer, then let the portable move the files from a UDMA card reader (faster than a non UDMA reader if have UDMA compliant cards) to PC memory where LR can convert to DNG format. Then LR can save them in folders on the drives in an arrangement you like (such as one folder for each calendar day).

In the evenings or plane home you can use LR to cull the rejects and maybe pick the "selects" you want to spend time on improving. When you get home you let LR in the desktop computer import the folders into its catalog. Then you can do the post processing on the select images. As needed you move images from LR to PS or PSE and back for specific things like using masks and layers.

I do shoot raw and would love to be able to just use my laptop with lightroom, store and file on external HD. Attach a large monitor and keyboard at home and only use the cpu for my photos. Guess I will know tomorrow. Then start looking into netbooks or just finding more money to get what is needed. Thnaks

I use a dual solution - Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA and a netbook. The Colorspace is purely for backup and has the advantage of being small enough to take out during the day. The Netbook can stay in my room.

At the end of each day cards are backed up to the Colorspace and the Netbook (via UDMA USB2 reader and Downloader Pro for renaming and sorting into folders by date). I then use Faststone to step through the images on the netbook and delete any obvious duds. Faststone just displays the embedded jpeg which is of suficiently good quality to tell the crud from the stuff with potential. That's a whole lot faster than using Lightroom to import images, convert to DNG and delete duds. I prefer to spend my evenings doing something more interesting than staring at a screen for a few hours.

When I get back home the images are transferred from the netbook to my working PC for importing into Lightroom.