Since the early days of Digital Photography I knew I had found an area of art/technology that I was passionate about. I loved the ability to take images, quickly review them and then keep the images that mattered to me. Over the last few years, as Digital Photography has matured, I have really enjoyed slowly developing a workflow that really suited my “digital darkroom” style.

The one area of my “workflow” that I have consistently struggled with is storing images while I am on the go. Once my card in my camera runs low on storage I find that I am always looking for ways to off-load images. There are a few tools in the industry that can help with this. The two common solutions that I run into are carrying around a Personal Storage Device or a laptop. I often have found that both solutions were not quite right for me. Personal Storage Devices are great but they are not multi-function. They do one thing (store data) and do it really well. However, space is limited in my gear bag and I don’t usually like to pack stuff that just does one thing – I like multifunction tools. Laptops, on the other hand, are great multi-function devices – but they take up space and weigh you down. Again not a great option as it then makes it hard to travel very far with my gear.

Since joining the UMPC Team I have found what I feel is a great solution. UMPC’s don’t take up a huge amount of space in my gear bag and provide the “multi-function” capabilities that you can commonly find in a Laptop. What’s especially great is that I get to pack along media and navigation solutions in a small device which helps me with a few of my needs when I am out looking for images. I wanted to share with the community a few tips I have picked up for using a UMPC device as an “on the go” image storage and viewing solution.

1. If you shoot raw files – see if your Manufacturer has a RAW Codec that will allow Vista to natively support the raw files in Windows Photo Gallery. Looking at the Microsoft PhotoBlog I see that several manufacturers have released codec’s for Vista .

   a. Microsoft Photo Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pix

   b. Example information on codec support on the Microsoft Photo Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/search.aspx?q=codec&p=1

2. The Microsoft Pro Photo Site is a great place to look at tools and get tips for Photography on Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/default.aspx. Tools from that site can be downloaded here.
    
   
3. Make sure you take a USB storage card reader with you so that you can easily pull images from several different memory cards. (Alternatively you could take the USB sync cord for your camera and pull the images directly from the camera.)

Recently I have been reviewing Microsoft’s Expression Media as a way to manage and view my images on my UMPC. Look for a follow-up post in a couple weeks with my impressions

- Scotty (aka that photo guy)