dyximan

I purchased an iMac with a 1 TB hard drive, and uploaded my photos from my PC, and found that about 40.000 photos of JPEG is a terabyte, and that raw is usually takes up about five times more space then that of a JPEG photo shot in fine plus or minus, I now have close to 60,000 photos and have consumed almost 1.5 TB, and probably 55,000 we're shot JPEG fine.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Depending upon your cameras' resolution, 650 to 700GB can accommodate a lot of images!

Do the math... look at how many fit onto memory cards you use now and divide 800GB by whatever size those cards might be, then multiply to get a pretty good estimate of how many images you'd be able to store. Note: The reason I used 650 to 700GB is because you normally won't want to fill a HD more than 90% total. Most computers start to have "issues" when their drives get fuller than that. So make some allowance, such as only allocating 650 to 700GB for image storage, which would total close to that 90% mark once you include the operating systems and other programs already on the drive.

I use a laptop with a second internal hard drive... a 500GB "boot" drive for the OS and programs and a 1TB "data" drive just for images. I added the second HD myself... plug and play, no big deal and not too expensive. You might see if that's a possibility with yours. The only drawback is that running two HDs uses up the battery a whole heck of a lot faster, so now I pretty much have to plug the laptop in to a power source to use it for any more than a half hour or 45 minutes.

If you can't add a second drive, you instead may be able to upgrade the laptop to a larger drive... 2TB or 3TB is probably possible and not too expensive (I just did a search and found both 2TB and 3TB 2.5" SATA drives widely available for under $100). It's not as easy to replace a boot drive... The old, smaller drive needs to be copied over onto the new, bigger drive, so you may need to have a tech do it for you. You also might want to have the new, big drive "partitioned". That makes it appear and act as if it's multiple drives, using one partition as the boot drive and one or more separate partitions for other purposes such as long term data storage.

If your laptop uses a solid state drive (SSD), I'd look for another place to save and/or backup my images. Although they're more stable than the earliest ones, SSD still are not really a safe choice to archive irreplaceable image files. It's not me saying this, but a friend of mine who's an engineer in charge of SSD manufacture for one of the largest companies making them. He knows I'm a photographer and has advised me to steer clear of SSD for critical storage purposes... or at least to back things up safely elsewhere.

Another possibility... thumb drives up to 256GB (1/4 TB) are small and are widely available. 256GB USB 2.0 thumb drives sell for $75 to $95 apiece. Some of those could be used for storage and/or backup.

Are you photographing the wedding in an "official" capacity? If so, I'd particularly make a point of securely saving and backing up those shots.

CatMarley Loc: North Carolina

How do you look at that many files? Perhaps we have discovered a new mental illness - "Photo-hoarding"?

mikeroetex Loc: Lafayette, LA

I agree, except, isn't a RAW file larger than 1 MB, closer to 20MB? That's still 833 hours, 104 days, 3.5 months (4 with weekends off)! So plenty of time to accumulate dust and cob webs!

mikeroetex Loc: Lafayette, LA

The math doesn't add up. You must be savig dupes or have a lot of programs on the Imac. If a jpeg averages a generous 4MB in size, then 40,000 is only 160 giga bytes. (4,000,000 x 40,000)

ppage Loc: Pittsburg, (San Francisco area)

The meaning of what you say is true but the math must be done based off the MP count of the camera. 16 is common for P&S and now we have anwhere between 18-50+ MP available on DSLR's The picture gets somewhat more realistic when factoring that in but I don't care what kind of camera you have, 875GB is a hellava lot of pictures. We cant proffer a size of 1MB to do this.

MtnMan Loc: ID

You might be surprised to find they actually sell hard drives in the wild west.

MtnMan Loc: ID

You don't need to lug a PC. There are inexpensive (about $40) devices that (among other things) allow you transfer directly from a camera card to the hard drive. You control them wirelessly from your phone.

MtnMan Loc: ID

That eliminates the intermediate device I mentioned above.

Says it includes power adapter: https://www.wdc.com/products/portable-storage/my-passport-wireless.html

It also appears to allow you to share images when you get an Internet connection.

Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

If I was expending that kind of energy and creative effort and money, I would have two backup WD or Seagate drives. I would write to them both at least once a day. Costco carries those for about $100. They are very small and light weight. Their is just no downside.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

The OP said he would be away for one month, which was rounded to 30 days. Estimates of 6000 shots were from other posters. I looked at my raw files and they run 25 MBytes apiece. Jpg files are variable and run 3-7 MBytes apiece. Let's be conservative and assume his wife decides to shoot raw also so 25 MBytes is what we have to consider. He has 875 GBytes available (his estimate). Again, conservatively let's say 800 GBytes. At 25 MBytes/shot (40 shots/GByte) he has room for 32000 shots on his 800 GBytes.

He doesn't want to store them all on cards, and I can't blame him for that. He wants to store them in his laptop and it looks like it's possible.

However, he's got them all in one place (his laptop). A single point of failure is not a good situation. At a minimum, one additional external hard drive is warranted. A 1 TByte drive will work for 32000 shots, but since 2 to 4 TByte drives are available at reasonable cost that should be considered. After all, he's not going to stop taking pictures after this trip, so there will eventually be more photos that need to be backed up. Planning ahead, a 2 TByte drive or larger could be a good choice. If I were him I would transfer all his files to the laptop, then to the external drive at the end of every day (or even more frequently).

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

The OP will be shooting raw, so the files are likely to be around 25 MBytes each. That gives 40,000 files per TByte. That's still a lot of files, but remember that this is the number of shots he's taking on a long trip, not the number of files he's going to wind up with as keepers. Yes, he's going to want to look at every one to see which ones to keep, but if his keeper rate is 10% (that's what I get) he will eventually wind up with 4000 files or fewer. Not quite so problematic. The initial triage to determine keepers will probably not take a minute for each image. In my initial look at a shoot I give each shot a couple of seconds to decide whether it will get looked at further or just ignored.

I estimate he could get through the evaluation in less than 2 days.

I cleaned out my Lightroom directory a couple years ago. Deleted obvious junk shots, compared duplicates and deleted the ones that I didn't want, and added keywords to the images that didn't have any. It was a lot of work. I started with 50,000 images and reduced that to 15,000. It took me about 3 weeks.

lmTrying Loc: WV Northern Panhandle

SD cards are my backups. They are light and small to carry. Change them out when ever necessary. Down load everything when you get home. I never erase nor re-format mine. They are my back ups.

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

Maybe he's got an OLD camera. Somebody made a 3mp camera that used discs. I can't remember who at this time.

lmTrying Loc: WV Northern Panhandle

OK, I'm new to all this message board stuff. Maybe I put my first reply in the wrong place. I was attempting to reply to vininnj2u as to what I would do on a month long photo shoot. I just got an email back already about using CDs. So I'm confused. But I will try again.
My second digital camera was a Canon EOS Rebel XSi. Thirty days later I went to the Dayton Air Force Museum for two days. Over 1000 photos later I had gone from fully Automatic to fully Manual to get any photos of the planes in the all black hanger under strong spotlights and inside the space capsules encased in light reflecting sheets of formed clear plastic. Those photos now reside on two laptops and the original SD Cards.
Before I head out on vacation, I stock up on SD cards for my Canons (now totaling 4 digitals). If I fill one up or want to keep like photos seperate, I use a new SD card. I keep the cards either in my camara case, or an SD card case I keep elsewhere. If by chance I would fill all my cards, WalMart is never too far away.
When I get home, I download all my pictures to my laptop, label and store the SD cards (full or not) as back ups. After 33 years of teaching school and 10 years selling John Deere Parts, I've learned the value of back ups. I have been considering using a 100meg external drive, or memory sticks as an additional back up.
Being a rather private person, I'm not inclinded to store anything on the cloud or turn everything loose on the airways.
By the way, I did try burning photos onto CD. Not for me.