Downloading & storing

[Gallopingphotog]

I'll be going on a 3-week trip in a couple months and will be taking a LOT of photos, shooting in RAW. I will have my Mac laptop and a portable hard drive, download nightly and then copy to the external drive as a backup. (Can't count on Internet connections being available.) I'm interested in hearing recommendations on which method to choose: downloading the RAWs into iPhoto or downloading to a file on my hard drive? I use Photoshop a lot for editing, but sometimes iPhoto just seems to get better results, plus it will automatically organize them, which would save me some time!
Thanks, and any tips for quick and easy ways to organize on the go would be appreciated. I definitely do not intend to spend all this vacation with my nose buried in a computer!

[Rentham]

Originally Posted by Gallopingphotog

I definitely do not intend to spend all this vacation with my nose buried in a computer!

In that case, I'd simply drop them into a folder on my HD and worry about sorting/selection when I got home from vacation.

[Robert Watcher]

I just got finished a 2 month excursion to Nicaragua - where I shot some 15,000 images in total. Previous years I have done the same thing in Costa Rica. The final selection of 2200 images are here - Travel Virgins : Travel Adventure Stories of Rob and Anne Watcher


I do not shoot in RAW so cannot offer any advice that way - - - but what I did find most valuable was using Lightroom on my Macbook (PlaneJane white) for organizing the files at the end of each day. The beauty of Lightroom for me, is the way that every day is automatically placed in a folder with the date so that I don't have to go back through all of the files later and sort them.

I created a folder on my USB powered 1TB portable hard drive where all files goes when Imported into Lightroom. These files are placed in a separate folder for each day. Also - being that I post a selection of the images each day - I am able to easily do a quick crop, clean up and any color tweakings that I want - - - and export the cleaned up set of full rez files to another folder on my hard drive that contains all of the processed files in new sequential numbered order - as well as upload resized web files onto my web server via FTP.

What I actually do for a second set of the files - is upload the full rez processed set of images at the end of each day - to my Flickr account. It isn't all the files I have taken and if I had to get the complete set of 2200 images off of Flickr - it may not be as convenient as a hard drive - - - but I know that I have them if something drastic happens with my computer and portable hard drive. As well it means they are stored in a location other than being with me. For the $25 for a year Flickr charges to have that kind of space to currently hold around 7000 full rez files, have that kind of protection and ease of uploading from distant lands - it is worth it to me. http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertwatcher/

All the best on your trip.