Charles, the thumb drive is a very useful device for transferring photos and other files from computer to computer; I use them all the time. The arithmetic is pretty easy: find out what the average size in MB of your photos is, then divide it into 128 MB to get the number of photos that can be transferred at one time. If they’re 1 MB files (large for a JPEG but very small for a TIFF), you can get approximately 128 on the thumb drive. If they’re e-mail size – about 100 KB – you can move over a thousand at a time.
Moving the photos on a portable drive should work just fine, unless there’s something about the computers we don’t know – like does each have a compatible connection for the drive itself? I believe most of those are USB.
The question about how many will fit on a 128MB drive is a little trickier, because we don’t know the size of those image files. JPEG originals from my 3MP camera are between 1 and 1.5MB each when saved at highest quality and lowest compression. The size varies a little depending on subject matter, particularly how much detail there is in a picture. You can get a good idea of how many can be moved at once by having your friend check the file size and do a little math. If she has a larger camera or if she shoots and saves in TIFF or RAW, the size of each image file will be significantly bigger.
Edit: Good morning, Chuck! You beat me. 🙂
Hi, Beth! As always, I like your answer better than mine…! 🙂
Speaking of these little buggers…anyone find a good site that doesn’t sell them for an arm and a leg ? … Thanks
Thanks Barb, got it bookmarked. Looked at the 1GB and 2 GB sizes…looks like I’ll need at least $200 for the el cheapo generics…gosh, I hope these come down in price….at least for X~mas.
Jodi, I have two 256 MB ones, $50 apiece at Sam’s Club. I haven’t yet needed anything larger than that. They’re prone to fail if you pull them from a USB port without going through the Safely Remove Hardware routine; would hate to wreck an expensive one…
Chuck
Thanks to all for the info, I’ll pass it along.
Charlie
Chuck…’safely remove hardware routine ???’…then I don’t want them. Thought they were just plug in-pull out.
Jodi, are you running Win XP? If so, almost any plug-in device should be removed using the Safely Remove Hardware routine. It’s easy; just click on the icon in the taskbar and select the hardward you want to remove; it comes back with the message ‘Safe to remove hardware’ and you pull the drive from the USB port. But when you’re in a hurry, it’s easy to forget. A work acquaintance had to send his back to the factory to be reinitialized after he failed to go through the protocol.
Chuck
The same procedure (or a variation of) should always, always be done with every removable media (Compact Flash, Smart Media, Secure Digital, etc.)
Windows XP / Mac OS X : right-click on the icon on the desktop (if you’ve chosen to have the card show up there), and choose "Eject". This insures any opened files is closed before you can remove the card.
Windows XP : If you don’t see an icon for the card, neither in the systray (near the clock) or on the desktop, open Explorer (Windows Explorer), right click on the drive corresponding to your media, then chose "Eject"
Failing to eject a card could result in lost pictures, or corrupted. Usually, a reformat should suffice to bring a card back to life, but when the pictures weren’t saved on the hard drive first, that could mean… catastrophe !
Ray
Ray, experience in the past has taught me to trust most of what you tell us, but this is completely new to me.
After uploading my images to my pc I always carelessly take my card out of the card reader and never had any problems.
Or am I misunderstanding something?
Leen
Tsk, tsk, tsk, Leen. 🙂 I’d say you’ve been lucky so far. I’ve always used the method Ray describes on both Wins and Macs, because I was taught it’s best to be sure the removable media has been properly dismounted before removing. And of course I ALWAYS follow every instruction given to me. (heh, heh.)
Leen, Beth, Ray, et.al.: I mount my card reader in the USB slot, and the reader is recognized as the device, not the CF card. I can put the card in th reader and take it out without any trouble, so long as the reader remains in the USB slot. It’s only when I remove the reader with a card in it that I would have to do the SRH routine. The jump drive, on the other hand, is the device and needs to be removed with caution.
Chuck
Chuck, thanks.
Your explanation will make me sleep much better. I should have been in bed right now. Beth, I ‘ve never seen you that naughty. 😉
Leen
Well thanks for the info…I never knew that I had to use the ‘ safely remove hardware’ thingy for my card reader…til now. Beth, you can go ahead and yell at me now….just don’t call me stupid…I’m a little down today.
OK, so thumb drive is back on the list. 🙂
I’m not gonna yell at ya Jodi! Why would I? (Happy Mom’s Day tomorrow, by the way – in case I forget then!)
Chuck, I’m not at all sure I understand the distinction you’re trying to make between the reader as the device and the card as the device. Are you telling me you never eject CDs either? When my reader is plugged in to my computer nothing shows on the desktop unless a card is in place, just like when I put in a CD, zip disk, or I have the external hard drive geared up. I properly dismount all of those, too. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I’ve never lost anything!
Mother’s Day ? Oh shit ! I forgot ! Well, I did call my mom today cause I knew she’s be out tomorrow… but forgot the inlaw….oops…must go shopping in the morning…darn !!!!( I’m a bad dil ) Thanks Beth 🙂
….I’ll think of you tomorrow as well ! Hope Louie gives ya something real nice 🙂
If I understood correctly what Chuck is doing, he’s going one step further, he’s actually "logically" disconnecting his reader from the computer. That’s a good practice, but unless suggested by the manufacturer, it appears unnecessary. Both my SanDisk card reader and HP printer’s card reader cannot be unmounted under Mac OS. Only the media can be, not the drives themselves. In Windows it was possible, and I believe recommended for the printer only not the standalone card reader, but a simple Eject will suffice.
Here are a few explanations about ejecting a card (applies to CF, SM, SD, et al):
Windows uses background writing to speed up applications responsiveness. In other words, it’ll open the document from the card, and later when processing time allows it, it’ll update the card’s structure to let it reflect the state of any documents modified (open for viewing, editing, renamed, etc.)
Problem is, with Windows ME and up, it also creates documents on the card as the user is viewing its content in the Windows Explorer (file named Thumbs.db is often found after Windows’ showed its content). While Windows is creating this file, it leaves the buffers and directory structure opened in case the user wishes to view again the content or actually makes some changes to any file (saves a lot of time on slower card reader and/or on USB
1.x devices, but it is also prone to accidents). Potential problem is when
Windows is working creating the thumbnails of the images, user remove the cards and Windows didn’t finish writing to the card.
On a Mac, as far as I can tell, it’s different as the Mac doesn¹t create any temporary file on a removable media. Those are mounted as drives on the desktop and any temporary stuff required to view the content is on the desktop, not the media. Still, if you’d have written something to the card, buffers might still be left opened. That’s why all OS have an Eject command. To ensure all temporary files are closed, and directory structure are updated before the card can be safely moved onto another device.
Trust me on this one, it’s much better to eject (with the proper command) any removable media before physically removing the media from the reader. It only takes a few seconds, but could save hours of work.
For anyone having work with older OS, like CP/M (pre MS-DOS era), you must remember at least one time when you removed a floppy from the drive and forget to hit CTRL-B prior to doing it. All documents were lost. Permanently. I know this, I did it myself. Only once. I got the lesson very fast 🙂
Ray
Ray, with thumb/flash drives, the logical disconnection is specified in the operating instructions. My external HD can also be disconnected using the same command, although I never do that.
