baloons

Tips for Saving Hard Drive Space During Travel

How you can save space for travel photos on your camera on the road

Oh, travels! It seems like in 2021, it is almost an atavism to go on trips and create new memories. However, the world started slowly recovering after the COVID hit, and soon enough, we will be able to take tons of amazing travel photos with our go-to action camera or even on the phone.

And since we all are so starved for new experiences, we do not doubt that your travel camera will be jam-packed with new exciting photos as soon as it is possible to travel safely again. If it happens in the middle of your trip, it can create a real crisis for you: would it be better to delete some of the old shots or just stop taking pictures?

To prevent this hard dilemma in your life, we gathered the most effective and easy ways to save hard drive space on your travels and get as many selfies and beautiful panoramic shots as you want! Let’s take a look at them!

hard drive

Use portable HDDs and SSDs

Of course, our first choice, which is like an extra brain for your laptop on the road, is using portable HDDs and SSDs to get extra space for your videos, vlogs, and photos. They are lightweight, easily will fit in your laptop bag, and some options can give you up to 8Tb extra space.

But what should you choose as your portable external hard drive? SSD or HDD? Well, it depends on your needs. For example, if you value speed more than anything else, an SSD should be your choice, though it is more expensive and the most affordable options can be up to 1Tb only.

HDD is an older technology, but these drives are cheaper, can give you a plethora of space for a reasonable price, and have as many photos saved as you want.

Organize with video and photo compressors

Before you start transferring thousands of pictures taken in the most beautiful places on Earth on your computer, you need to go here and download video compression software to compress your videos. It drastically reduces your files’ size and helps save some space on your hard drive. What’s most important, your videos will not lose anything in quality after compressing. It’s just a win-win situation!

Usually, photos do not take much space, but the ones that were shot on a high-quality DSLR camera can weigh as much as a short video. We recommend you use a photo compressing tool to save space here, just like a video compressor with videos. Our favorite online compressor you can find here, but frankly, use any that makes good compression without losing quality.

Spring cleaning: let’s make more space on your hard drive

In addition to compressing the files on your hard drive, we have a bunch of other tips to help you make room for new photos and videos on it.

First of all, visit your recycle bin and finally clean it! It can seem that everything you sent to that place doesn’t matter anymore, but those files are still taking space on your disc!

If you are using hefty programs like Photoshop, video editors, big games, etc., consider uninstalling every unnecessary program. Do you still need those games, or did you forget to delete them? In general, go through your Documents, pictures, and all other folders and get rid of anything that is useless but takes up the space on your laptop.

Next, check your Temporary Files folder and delete garbage files from it: you don’t need them anymore, but they are still around.

Cloud drives

If you are already on the road, have cleaned every possible corner on your laptop, got a full pocket of portable drives, and still need more space, we suggest you start using virtual hard drives and services to save your travel photos and videos.

Virtual hard drives or cloud drives are essentially a space on a virtual server where you can put your files just like on a regular physical drive. You can use a free cloud drive like Google Drive, Dropbox Cloud Drive, or iCloud if you are a user of any Apple products.

Also, Google has dedicated apps, like Google Photos App, to save your pictures, so you can use it instead of a drive if you save only pictures.

Most cloud storages have basic free plans, and you can use them for any need. Google offers 15GB for free and iCloud 5GB. However, you can expand your storage for a small fee and have up to 2TB of space on every virtual hard drive. It is an excellent choice on travels because you can cancel your subscriptions after reviewing the materials and deleting bad shots and videos.

Using cloud storage is also a great choice if you can’t take your laptop on your trip and will be taking photos with your phone only. In this case, cloud drives are your saviors, and this is our final verdict!

Conclusion

Precious memories from your travels should be saved forever, but sometimes your phone or a camera just say enough and refuse to take pictures due to the lack of storage space.

In this case, you need to get a portable SSD or HDD, use virtual storage Google Photos to share the pictures with it, and, of course, make the best effort to clean your hard drive space for new shots.

And most importantly, in 2021, you must compress your files before storing them because it is a huge space saver that doesn’t mess with the quality. If you do all of these things, you will have an abundance of storage space for amazing travel photos that will capture the best times of your life. Have a great trip!

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Zeen Subscribe
A customizable subscription slide-in box to promote your newsletter
[mc4wp_form id="314"]