Every now and then I comment on how you have to change your scope (size) in having a media storage plan. I will use myself as a convenient example.

I am going to an island 3000 miles off shore and the fuel costs dictate that I don’t have my usual big hard drive as an emergency backup for my photos. To complicate the matter, I’m using a camera that takes much larger images and takes high quality video to boot. Without  a moment of thought, this could spell disaster for someone trying to master the art of Mai Ti drinking and not noticing until too late that he’s “out of film”.

I’ll go over image storage plans from start to finish so you get the big picture.

I store overall files of pictures and videos in folders of approximately 4 GB. That’s so I can back up the files to a DVD (“DigitalDisk25”, as an example.) I store this DVD backup outside the computer in case the computer “fries” because of an electrical hiccup. Notice that this sort of backup doesn’t work with a cloud backup system because of time and space considerations. I have approximately 100 GB of just photo backups (15X4GB). So the photo backup drive in the computer is a dedicated drive in the 1 or 2 TB range.

My “old” camera took photos with an 8 Mbit sensor and would store an ~8MB raw image and an ~3.5MB jpg (typical compressed) image every time I would push the button. That’s about 12MB per picture, so I’d get by fine with a 16 GB card, giving me, maybe 1000 button pushes per card. 

This could easily fit most people’s vacation, but when I had 2 or 4 or 1GB cards, I needed a laptop to “download” the images every day or two.

Now I have a camera that uses about 30MB for each button push (image in two formats). So  I’ve gone to a 32GB card and will rely on my older 16GB card and other smaller ones as necessary with no plans to bring a laptop. In an emergency I could use the 32GB micro-memory card I have added to my tablet. As I have pointed out in recent posts, I can connect the OTG connector and directly download photos from my new camera, via USB, to the micro drive in my Galaxy Tab 2 tablet. (Didn’t notice that I said that? Well I did. You just slept through it because you hadn’t figured out what “OTG” meant. You should know now from my more recent posts trying to drive home the meaning.)

So much for storage.

The plan is to also make a few movies. Now movies use a lot of memory if they”re HD and relatively uncompressed. Now I’m NOT talking about my smart phone. Those movies are, technically “HD” quality by very compressed and not good enough for the big silver screen and barely good enough for YouTube and viewing on another smart phone. I’m talking about a few top-quality movies, maybe of a hula or a beach with surfers or a turtle or something like that. I’m not bringing a production studio in my backpack, so these will be catch as catch-can (only a few under very favorable circumstances). Because it’s a vacation, I may film zero high quality movies. Maybe just  a few (there’s no word for it) “snapshot” movies while laying in the sand or cooking some shrimp on the condo grill, just to upload to Facebook to piss off a relative or two. Ample payback for having to watch their kids sit on Santa’s lap or having to look at their last batch of cookies.

I DO now have the ability to upload smart phone movies and pictures directly from any location with 3G data service. This kind of coverage is unlikely for anybody (even Veriizon customers) on the North Shore, but should be okay in some of the areas around Poipu and Kapaa. 

If the condos actually have “high speed WI-FII” like they claim, I should be able to upload things to email, Facebook, and this blog.