Maybe we can arrange for those that are planning to bring their laptops (as Crash stated he was) to see if anyone would volunteer to burn the cds fro the memory cards so we don't have to pay so much $ to shutters to do this for us?
As stated...
... I'd be happy to burn CDs or DVDs - however... if anyone shoots large images by the 1000s (like me) then burning a 700mb CD takes about 30 minutes on average. I have a slow CD burner on mt Dell notebook.
This would work for 700mb chunks of data... but most folks will have A 1GB card. I'd have to organize a near 700mb set to burn - confirm the CD was reading OK - then erase that portion of the card - or burn a CD and a half to clear the card.
On the other hand - a CDRW would not finalize the disc and be rewriteable, obviously. I could leave the half or partially full CDs unfinished too - but the I can't really check them the way I lilke to until they're finished. Of course, CDs are not particularly expensive either... running a dine to a quarter in cost.
I think the best approach is to have a list of volunteers with notebooks willing to burn CDs, DVDs or CDRW discs. With any luck the volunteers will be spread out on the ship and then the needs of all can be spread around. I don't remember what Shutters charges for CD burning.
Oh yeah... I habe another solution. I could make a copy of ALL the photos on a portable HD then I would have a secure copy of all the images. The reason I am being so paranoid about this is I have observed that it seems some computers and photo lab readers are particular about which CDs they will read. This may sound crazy - but I have seen it. Different brands of CD burned off different computers are somtimes unreadbale on other computers or lab printers (like Costco or
Walmart). So - to me - our precious pictures are invaluable! I would NOT want to hand someone a finished CD or DVD of their images - only to learn the disc is unreadable on thier computer or at their photo printer!
I have sold some of my pictures - and some were sent on CD - and a few were unreadable. I charged a fair sum per CD - so I was being very careful to burn a good disc... and still some were apparently incompatible. I never fully figured out why - except to say when I changed the brand of CD or the utility used to burn it - or the end user tried a different computer on their end to read it - then it worked?
So - to work around this risk - I need a backup copy. I would not even want a backup CD. Mainly because of the time necessary to make one. However to back up to an external HD is OK. My notebook hard drive has fairly limited space for backing up the images of several DIS folks. And, of course, I would be honor bound to erase the files once the CD or DVDs were confirmed as readable on the computers back home for everyone.
I put a lot of effort into my photos. I shot a lot of precious moments and cherish them. Everyday we see dozens if not 100s rotate on our screen savers and on a digital photo frame. These memories do nothing but warm the heart every day. And losing almost all the photos from our upcoming transcanal voyage sounds like a tragedy best avoided. Even if you burn a CD at shutters - that CD can become damaged or lost. For myself - I usually burn to CD and keep a copy on the hard drive of the notebook when we vacation.
At any rate... this takes a little more thought as to what routine I will offer - and the volume I can comfortably handle given that I am on vacation too.
I was that way with my first job.
I actually refused to babysit tonight. Too cold here again!!! Think we might need another card too. The prices have rally gone down. We use X cards.
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