I took hundreds of 10 Megapixel photos per day, shooting RAW to capture maximum dynamic range.  Since each photo uses about 10 MB, I could come close to filling a 4 GB CF card in a day.  Not wanting to buy thousands of dollars worth of cards, how could I store all of these photos?

Each night, I would look through the photos on the camera’s LCD and choose a very small number to store on the xD card that I kept in the camera. (Olympus allows you to transfer images between CF and xD).  I would also download all of the images from the CF card to my 80 GB SmartDisk portable hard drive.  Then I would erase the CF card and be ready for another day. The xD card was an emergency backup in case the hard drive failed catastrophically, although it would have been a great pity to have to be left with only the few images per day that I stored there.  (That said, virtually all of the images on these pages were among the ones that I hurriedly selected for saving to xD; in practice, I knew most of my favorite shots when I saw them).

This system worked well, and if I had it to do over again I would do it pretty much the same way.

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