How can I offload photos from 3G without a computer?
I'm traveling to Africa for 2 weeks and will not have a laptop. Does anyone know of a device for offloading files from the iPhone to a 2GB USB thumb drive without a computer involved? I know I'm going to fill up the phone several times over and want to be able to back up the photos to multiple thumb drives.
I will also want to do this type of thing from a separate digital camera I'm also bringing to capture video.
I have to ask, if you are bringing a digital camera with you why not use that as your primary photo source, any digital camera will be vastly superior to the iphones camera?
If you have access to wifi then use mobile me, flickr or some other upload service, check out the app store for flickr or similar apps. Not sure if these also work over standard GSM networks, might be very slow and expensive with roaming charges.
Does the iphone camera folder appear when plugged into any PC? You could bring a usb cable and use an internet cafe/hotel pc? One of the more useful features of most other phones is the ability to use bluetooth to transfer files such as photos but I guess we shall wait for features such as these on this product. Also for future maybe the opening up of the connector port will allow companies to develop plug in drives but again one for the future. I guess Mr Jobs vision of a connected world without wires and no external physical components only works in areas of network investment!
Just to be sure, since you are saying photos and not video, are you SURE you are going to fill the phone several times over?
I've got 2,169 photos on my 16GB 3G, and they only take up 1.37 GB of space. So, if I were to sync far less music, I could very easily get more than 20,000+ photos on there. You sure you'll take that many?
Otherwise, getting photos to a 2GB thumbdrive would be near impossible, especially since you should be able to store many more photos than 2GB worth.
Scratch that; I just read that the max for Camera Roll is 999 pictures. That wasn't definitive though. Does anyone know definitively the max number the Camera Roll will hold before you have to sync to get more photos?
Thank you for your advice. I'm going to re-think my strategy with the camera and iPhone combination. The iPhone was mainly going to be for sending photos back to adoptive families of their future children, but I'm considering deleting a bunch of unneeded apps and other items from the phone to clear out space. I should have enough for that.
The only other thing is the camera (off topic of iPhone, I know, but if you have ideas...). When I was in Hawaii for a week, I filled its 8GB SD card with a moderate shooting schedule of video and stills. Luckily I had an extra 32MB card to capture a few more pics. This trip, however, is 2 weeks long and each week I anticipate shooting twice as many pics as in Hawaii. There are 200 kids I want to document using several photos and videos each, plus other cultural and business subjects for helping promote the orphanage online for adoptive parents, sponsors, and donors. Through my work, I have a supply of multiple 2GB thumb drives...if I only had an easy way to transfer files from the 8GB SD card to the thumb drives but without a computer. It would be good for freeing up space, but also for having a safe backup in case something goes wrong, the camera gets stolen, etc.
There is an internet café in the area, but I greatly fear the kinds of viruses that would expose my files to abroad and at home, which is one reason I'm not bringing a laptop. The other reasons I'm not bringing it are fear of theft and fear of it not being rugged enough to handle dust, moisture, kids messing with it, etc.
You've given me more avenues to think about, but if you can point me to a device that will do what I'm trying to do, I'll be very grateful.
There are multimedia players that have usb host facilities, I use an Archos 705 with 160gb drive, but I do agree that SD cards are cheap and a bunch of these is what I would choose
I would use a cheap digital camera, even cheap digital cameras will take better pictures than the iphone and will offer a usable / cheap method of storing these photos through SD/CF memory.
If you still want a phone combination then get a medium to high range Nokia, most take better pictures than the iphone (3-5mp) some have flash and autofocus and all have SD slots.
The iphone is great in connected environments (wireless hotspots/high speed 3g networks) but venture outside this and it fails on its lack of physical interfaces (someone said its has a large memory but if the phone is lost/stolen then you lose everything, at least with a stack of SD cards you have a backup). Even the older ipods had some ability to interface external memory devices but so far the iphone has a gap in this capability.
Personally, I'd hate to go to Africa and come back with a bunch of pix/video taken on a 3MP camera with a teeny lens and no flash or zoom, so I don't see why you would be bothering to use the phone camera much at all.
The iPhone was mainly going to be for sending photos back to adoptive families of their future children
other than for that. But once sent, you can delete those--the family has them, you will be taking other better pix/video with your real cameras.
Don't forget to investigate international data rates (expensive!) with your carrier. Or made sure you will have wireless access, to be sending those emails.
peejay33 wrote:
DaVBMan – "In case you don't know, you can send multiple images at once since 3.0 update."
Cool. How is this accomplished?
go to Photos and hit the action button; it will then say 'select photos' on the top; i thought i read you can only send 5 but never tried more. then you hit 'share' and you can MMS, email, send to m.me (which could be a better solution than email to off-load w/o computer).. if you set up some libraries before you go, you can upload the logical groups right to m.me and people can see them immediately.
m.me has 60 day free trial, if your trip is shorter than 2 mo you could just use the trial.
