How to store digital photos while traveling

By Sean O'Neill
October 3, 2012

Reader of This Just In, Corey Larsen Bauer, writes:

Got a dilemma we need help with....our teenage daughter will be leaving soon to be an exchange student to Norway for a year. What's the best way to store so many photos she'll take? Should she take a laptop to download them on? Or quite a few memory sticks or what?!?!

Well, Corey, Thanks for your message. You must be so proud of your daughter getting to go to Norway! [By the way: Budget Travel has often covered the country often, including this story: "Have You Cruised in a Fjord Lately?"]

My suggestion is that your daughter get an annual "Pro" subscription to Flickr.com, a beguiling website for storing and sharing photos.

The Pro subscription will let her upload her photos from her laptop--or from a friend's computer. That way, her photos will be saved someplace safe in case the camera dies or the memory stick is lost.

What's more, Flickr makes it easy to share photos with others by email, or to make postcards using sites like Moo.com. The site is free to use and to store a small batch of photos, but you need to get a $25-a-year subscription to store an unlimited number of snapshots. However, I think the fee is worth it.

When your daughter takes daytrips around the country or Europe, she could bring along a small 256 megabyte memory stick, which costs about $50 and which can be used as an interim storage device for storing a couple hundred photos (depending on the size of the images and the quality of her digital camera). If she doesn't plan on bringing a computer, she can borrow someone else's to download her photos, if her camera uses a standard cable (such as a USB cable).

Another argument for using Flickr instead of another photo-sharing website is that it is owned by Yahoo, so it will have the financial wherewithal to last for a long time. In other words, by using this site, you have a lower risk of having to switch to another storage site in the near future. For more info on options, consider visiting Digital Photography Review.

Another reader, Vanessa O'Donnell, offers the following tip:

Another option would be to use shutterfly. Photos can be uploaded in the same manner as Flickr but without the cost and prints can be ordered directly from the site. I've used shutterfly numerous times and frequently receive "coupons" from them for things such as 25 free 4x6 or 1 free 8x10

Hey reader: If you have a helpful suggestion, please post a comment!

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Breaking: Marriott to launch boutique hotels

Moments ago, Marriott announced a partnership with Ian Schrager, the developer of some of the world's best-known boutique hotels, to build roughly 100 boutique hotels within the next several years. The partners say they will have five development deals signed by the end of the year, and that a brand name for the line of boutique properties should appear within a few months. The news is surprising because in many ways the Marriott brand is the antithesis of what consumers think of when they think of a boutique hotel, such as Schrager's Gramercy Park Hotel, where the news was announced. Marriott hotels tend to have hundreds of rooms that look interchangeable and are designed to consistently deliver a room for the night for business travelers. Schrager's hotels are small and feature modern art, unusual light fixtures, oddly-sized lobbies with wood-burning fireplaces or enormous high-definition TV sets--with no two hotels having an identical look. Even at the press conference this morning, the different personal styles of Schrager and Bill Marriott were striking. Schrager wore a collarless black shirt and a black sportcoat, while Marriott wore a navy blue suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a standard necktie. Marriott admitted that the guests going to Schrager's hotels haven't been going to Marriott's hotels. But, he said, he didn't see why his company couldn't attract them by building a new set of properties. After all, he noted, Marriott recently announced a partnership with Nickelodeon to build hotels that assiduously aims to please children. "And with this deal we're going after the grown-up kids," he said.* Schrager responded with a funny facial expression that quickly turned into a smile. Despite differences, money talks, of course. And the boutique hotel segment of the business has been enormously profitable. Marriott's resources--its reservations systems and existing supply channels and staff--could help reduce the cost of building additional boutique hotels, and put them with an reasonable "splurge" zone for budget-conscious travelers. Earlier: Marriott announces a deal to create kid-friendly hotels. Related info: For delightfully obsessive coverage of hotel trends, visit HotelChatter.com. Update: HotelChatter has more info on this deal. *A typographical error in this original blog post said "sad" instead of "said."

The coolest new digital maps

The first videoguide to hotels has debuted. Trivop.com, a European Web agency for booking hotels, has filmed videos of several hotels in Paris and has embedded them in a Google map of the city. You can click on a hotel and get a virtual tour of its amenities, helping you confirm if the hotel deserves its star rating. Reviews are pulled in from other travelers via TripAdvisor.com, and a Google mashup map is used, to help you see where any given hotel is located relative to the major attractions in the city. While the videos have been edited in an amateurish way, they provide high-quality images of what the hotel rooms, lobbies, and exteriors truly look like. Check it out here. (Link via Vijay Dandapani) Future digital maps will offer three dimensional simulations of cities. Consider the new 3-D simulation of ancient Rome, called RomeReborn1.0, that will soon be made available to the public by its inventors at the University of Virginia. This digital model of the city will reproduce for tourists "on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theater to be opened near the Colosseum...what the Colosseum, the Forum, the imperial palaces on the Palatine once looked like," according to this Reuters story in the L.A. Times. What's more, "When in virtual Rome, visitors will be able do to even more than ancient Romans did: They can crawl through the bowels of the Colosseum, filled with lion cages and primitive elevators, and fly up for a detailed look at bas-reliefs and inscriptions placed atop triumphal arches," according to this Associated Press article, via USAToday/World Hum. Meanwhile, Seattle's Pike Place Market is a popular tourist attraction that receives loving treatment in a new interactive map by the Los Angeles Times. See it here. It's a precursor, I think, to the types of maps you'll someday find in digital guidebooks, which travelers will download and read on their personal computers or wireless digital devices. Or future digital maps may simply be enhanced Google Maps. For example, look at this superdetailed Google mash-up map of Walt Disney World, which plots every location with a description and photos--including facts about individual rest rooms. (To see details, you need to zoom in by adjusting the map scale with the slider control on the side of the map.) (Link from The Disney Blog).

Inspiration

Celebrate Frida

Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter and feminist famously portrayed by Salma Hayek in Frida, would have celebrated her 100th birthday on July 6. To commemorate her life and work, Mexico City is hosting the largest retrospective of her work ever held. The show, which opened today at the museum at the Palace of Fine Arts, includes over 350 works--an impressive third of the artist's oeuvre. Also included are manuscripts, photographs, and letters written by the artist, in addition to a collection of paintings that have never been publicly shown. The exhibition runs until August 19. During the month of August, Frida's childhood home of Casa Azul (now the Frida Kahlo Museum), located in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacan, will be exhibiting some 300 articles of the artist's clothing, as well as letters from Diego Rivera, the renowned muralist to whom Frida was married. (Details at museofridakahlocasaazul.org.)

Inspiration

Where does the Guinness man go on vacation?

Fergal Murray's job is to visit about 400 Irish pubs worldwide every year... As one of eight master brewers for Guinness, the Irish stout maker, Murray is an international ambassador for the brand. This year he expects to hopscotch Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean over the course of about 20 weeks. He will, as always, be thanking pub owners for selling Guinness and offering tips on how to store and pour the beverage. Given his broad travel experience, Murray knows by heart a variety of spots worth visiting. His favorite place to take his family on vacation is Quinta do Lago, an oceanside resort town in Algarve, the most southern region of Portugal. Last year he went there with his wife and their two sons, a one-year old and a four-year old. Here's what he has to say about the place: "I would recommend it for American families for a few reasons. First, the town's restaurants and hotels are set up to entertain small children. You can walk into any restaurant with two kids and let the kids be themselves without feeling self-conscious as a parent. The pools are designed to be safe for children, and there's always someone around to mind them. Second, the weather's good and the beaches are fantastic. Third, it's a favorite destination of Irish and British families, but I'd be totally surprised if any American family visits there. So if you are an American visiting the town, you will truly feel like you are visiting another country because none of your fellow citizens will be near you, while you'll still enjoy the benefits of child-friendly facilities and English-speaking staff." While I chatted with Murray, I had a few pressing questions to ask that weren't precisely travel related, but he was kind enough to answer them anyway... Is there any downside to your job as master brewer? I can't stand being served a bad pint. And this causes a problem when I'm out with my wife and two kids. I'll be served a bad pint--it even happens in Dublin, from time to time. Knowing what my reaction will be, my wife will say, "You're not going to do that, now are you?" and then she'll go off somewhere else because she doesn't want to hear any more about how to pour the perfect Guinness, and she knows it's going to take an hour for me to instruct the bartenders. Maybe they need to clean the lines, or change the mix of gas, or make sure that someone behind the bar is fully engaged, instead of looking at blond at the end of the bar. How does a person become a Guinness master brewer? There's a bit of drinking involved, of course. But primarily it's a process, a craft. You join Guinness at some stage of your life, and you experience it, and when you've experienced enough, you take exams and get accredited by an external organization. It takes about ten years of experience, and the exams are fairly challenging, covering everything from running a power plant to the chemistry of beer. You spent three years in Nigeria working for Guinness. What was the deal with that? In Nigeria, they don't have the same infrastructure, generally speaking, for serving draft Guinness at the ideal temperature. So we concentrated on marketing our beer by the bottle. The Guinness stout sold there is about 7.5 percent alcohol, while in the 'States it's about 5 percent and in Europe it's about 5.5 percent. We vary the alcohol level primarily to accommodate local tastes and regulations and storage methods. What's your favorite pub in Quinta do Lago? De Barra. It has an outside deck, great beer, and great craic (the Irish term for good conversation). Learn more about Algarve and Quinta do Lago at VisitPortugal.com. For discounted travel to Portugal, check out a recent Real Deal for airfare and a week in Lisbon and Porto from $1,044. Earlier: Learn about kid-friendly places to stay in Europe by clicking here.