Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis

My suggestion is Take as many 16g cards as you can afford,(min. one for each day) remember once purchased they don't eat and NEVER put all your eggs in one basket.

Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis

Just because you have never had a card fail it dosen't mean it don't happen!!!
Once you have had a card fail you might, just might understand.
Much safer to use many smaller cap. cards and only lose (and maybe recover) one days images.
been there done that it is not fun and I only lost about an hours worth of images on a 2g card.
50$ and 16 hrs at the computer I was lucky enough to recover all most all of the images. It's hard to believe but the recovery program recovered every image taken on that card even though the card had been reformatted after each download and to make matters worse each image was given a new file #. Newer recovery programs may do better now but I am not about to test them if at all possible.

Leon S Loc: Minnesota

Lets see. You've spent thousands on the trip and will spend even more for tours, off shore items, and incidental travel and more. What's the cost of more SD cards in comparison. If money is the issue, buy them from a place that will take them back if you don't use them. I'd have one for each day and start the shoot by taking a picture of something that says where you are that day. Even if it is daily newspaper sheet the ship slips under your door in the morning. After a while its hard to remember where and when you were there. Enjoy your trip.

nospambob Loc: Edmond, Oklahoma

Invariably it will be one more than what you brought ….

Idaho

You'll probably take about 10,000 pictures. Why would someone need that many? And go on to store them indefinitely ? I have no idea. Because you can? That is what the trend is currently.

edwdickinson Loc: Ardmore PA

Are you taking a laptop? For all travel I take 2 64gb sd cards. At end of day I offload to laptop which auto backups to cloud which sync's to home server.

JohnH3 Loc: Auburn, AL

I went to Alaska last year. I shot raw + jpeg on a Canon D6 and Canon T6s. I used two 64 gig cards. One in each camera. However, in hindsight, I think if I were taking the trip again, I would use multiple 16 and 32 gig cards. Both of my cameras only have one card slot (no backup). Had a card gone bad, I would have lost “all” of the pictures on that camera. Probably better to use smaller cards or multiple cards for safety purposes unless your camera supports two cards. However, in all of my years shooting digitally, I have never once had an SD card go bad, but I know there is a first time for everything!

lmTrying Loc: WV Northern Panhandle

If you are like most of us, you will see things you have never seen before, and will never see again. Some scenes you will attempt to make perfect, adjust an shoot again. Others you will grab a quick snapshot. Some wildlife you may want to shoot in quick bursts. And some in short videos.

I would suggest: a 10 card storage case, a 16 or 32 gb card for each day plus an extra. Format each card in camera before you leave. Have tabs of paper labeled for each day and change to a new card each night when you are in a quiet an still place.

I would also recommend having three fully charged batteries ready to go each day. Don't forget your charger.

Me, I leave the laptop and all the drives at home. You can do all that when you get home. Enjoy the trip and have fun. Don't work on vacation.

TN Vol Fan

I did the cruise and land portion. I took 3- 32GB cards and wound up with over 3000 shots. Be prepared to see Alaska in all its beauty but I will always remember how raw it is in the back country. Don’t miss the train ride in Shagway and also Denali National Park. I attached a shot of Denali NP. Have Fun!

bikerguy

On two separate trips we had an SD card fail. Because we backup at least once per day we only lost one day's images from one camera. In the first case the images could not be recovered in the second they were. To me the question isn't how many cards to take but rather how are you going to backup all of your images. We do a double backup: the first to a 1 TB hard drive and the second to either or both a flash drive and/or micro sd card that can be inserted into our tablets. Additionally, we do not reformat any cards until we get home unless we run out of space. We tend to travel with 9 32GB SD cards for 2 cameras, a Canon 77D and a Canon G3x. We only shoot RAW and generally come home with at least one unused SD card. Storage is cheap. We use a tablet and a Kingston Mobilelite with our HDD and flash drives to maintain backups. It is light and easy to use. The tablets also double as readers. On most of our trips we have had either limited or no connectivity so this works for us.

TGanner Loc: Haines, Alaska

If you are coming to Haines, I do offer private photography day tours. Most folks find Haines to be the highlight of their trip. Feel welcome to contact me with general questions too, regardless. https://timenspace.net/photography-workshop/haines-private-tour/

hpucker99 Loc: Anchorage, Alaska

I was traveling through Alaska for 3 weeks earlier this month, mostly the road system, Arctic Thunder air show at Elmendorf, ferry ride from Valdez to Whittier, drive up the Steese Hwy to Circle, numerous day hikes, etc. I ended up shooting a little over 60,000 shots not including 9 time lapses that were about 2500 shots each. I was on a trip a few years ago and ended up buying a collection of SD cards (32 and 64 GB) when my hard drive on my laptop filled up. Used just about all the cards I had with me, I didn't want to reuse cards unless I had to.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I'd want four 16GB cards, or maybe 32GB cards. You should also have some means of backing them up every day, like a wireless hard drive.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

The over simplified answer is how many pictures you plan to take multiplied by the size file in Mb that your cameras makes in the mode you are recording (RAW, JPG small, medium, large). The other way is to look at the chart that is usually somewhere in the back of your camera manual; especially if you do not know the file size your camera makes in the file type you plan to use (hopefully RAW).

The last time I went on an Inside Passage cruise, I took my Nikon D800 and made about 1500 exposures. That is my average weekly figure for each week of any cruise regardless of where the cruise is. I also take tours at almost every port of call. If you take bus tours, that will greatly inflate your number of exposures because you will be fighting the buses speed and glare and dirt on the windows. That means you will need to shoot rapidly and make more exposures as backups. If you do not take bus tours, that will lower your exposure count. If you are going on a whale watching excursion at one of your ports, you should add another 200 exposures to your equation because you will be constantly shooting to try to capture a moment and spot in the water that can be very unpredictable. There will be many misses, especially if you are using a long telephoto.

Since I shoot in RAW, which everyone should be doing, my average file size for each exposure is about 42 Mb. So, 1500 + 200 exposures = 1700 exposures multiplied by 42,000,000 bytes each = 7,140,000,000 (7.14 Gb). So I could get by with a 8 Gb (16 Gb just in case) flash memory card, but I normally have 256 Gb cards in my camera anyway. Many photographers use one flash card for each day of shooting, which lowers the minimum size requirement.

scuff

I have a 64g that I was shooting in raw and jpeg that I took on a 8 day trip south and the smokies. By the end of the trip I was deleting pics to make room.