When I travel, the mirrorless camera always goes along. If the trip is photography-focused, I bring a computer and plan to spend evenings editing the best photos of the day. I also make sure everything is backed up to a separate drive each evening.
However, if it’s a vacation or a visit with family, I leave the computer at home both to reduce weight in the suitcase and so I don't end up editing pictures rather than to spending quality time with family.
But, those pictures still need to be backed up in case the SD card fails or luggage gets lost. And I might want to share some of the best pictures on social media during the trip.
I've experimented with a number of back up and mobile editing solutions and here is what I have adopted as my work flow while traveling without a computer.
On every trip, I bring my iPad to read books, watch movies, or browse travel websites. It could be an Android tablet, but I’m fully ensconced in the Apple ecosystem. With the right dongle files can be transferred from the camera’s SD card to a USB drive. In iPad OS, open the Files app, attach the dongle with the SD card and USB drive inserted, and voila! Files can be copied between the two without taking up memory on the iPad. I do this every evening before bed, hopefully with a glass of wine in hand. Remember to store the backup USB drive in a different suitcase from your camera equipment.
This provides a local backup, but what about a remote backup in case of lost luggage? With the Adobe Photography Creative Cloud subscription photos can be uploaded from Lightroom Mobile on the iPad to Adobe cloud storage. However, the regular subscription only offers 20 GB of storage, which is insufficient for even a day’s worth of photos on my camera. For longer trips I add Adobe’s 1TB storage plan for a month overlapping the trip to ensure there is plenty of cloud space for all the pictures I might take.
As part of my evening routine, after copying the files to a local USB drive, I import them into Lightroom Mobile on the iPad and let them upload. Yes, this requires a decent Wi-Fi connection, which I’ve generally had good luck with at my hotel or while grabbing a drink at a local cafe. With Lightroom Mobile, the photos can be edited and posted to social media. While the edits may not be as refined as can be achieved on the computer, Lightroom Mobile's tools produce good results.
Upon returning home the photos with edits are waiting for me in Lightroom. They’re in the cloud and need to be transferred to a local drive to free up cloud space so the extra storage subscription can be discontinued. The final step for me is to import them in to Lightroom Classic which is my editor of choice on the computer.
Here are a few considerations:
1. In my normal workflow when importing directly into Lightroom Classic on the computer, I rename the file, apply some develop presets, and add keywords. Lightroom Mobile can apply presets as a separate step after import but it lacks the ability to rename files or add keywords. If desired, these tasks must be performed as the files are imported into Lightroom Classic after returning home.
2. Flags don’t transfer between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, so I use Stars or Colors to highlight photos in Lightroom Mobile.
An alternative backup option is to use an SD card instead of a USB drive. SD cards are often more affordable for the same storage capacity, and I’ve collected a lot of them. The speed of the SD card or USB drive is not a significant factor for this use.
If you aren't carrying a tablet then a smart phone can be used for the back up steps outlined above. Of course, editing for social media will be a little more difficult on a small screen.
It’s worth noting that while a Kindle can be used for the local backup step, there’s no Kindle version of Lightroom Mobile for the Adobe cloud storage step.
The dongle pictured is compatible with an iPad that uses a Lightning connector. Amazon offers a wide variety of dongles with connectors for different tablets, so choose the one that best suits your needs. However, it’s advisable to avoid purchasing extremely cheap dongles, as they may fail at the worst possible time (speaking from experience here).
Before adopting the above Adobe cloud workflow I used Microsoft OneDrive to upload pictures from my iPad (Dropbox and other cloud drives will work just as well). It worked fine though I had some trouble with RAW files getting converted to JPEGs. And I wasn't happy with the mobile edits I did in other apps so I didn't end up posting to social media during the trip. Not to mention that I had all the pictures to import at the end of the trip rather than doing it a day at a time during the trip. In essence, using the Adobe cloud storage plan folded right into my existing workflow.
