Coping with unintended consequences of carry-on baggage weight restrictions

[suttonbg]

When I travel, I like to download my images each night via a Win10 PC to two external HDDs, carried separately. This paranoia started when a friend had his SD card fail on the way down from a successful, once-in-a-lifetime mountain climb. Sandisk recovered most of the data, but for a cost just a little shy of doing the entire trip again. My trusty Microsoft Surface 2 gave up the ghost last year, so I replaced it with a Surface Book 2. Wonderful machine, but just a kilogram heavier.

Then along came the probably long-overdue vigilance by airlines on carry-on baggage weight. I discovered that, by small degrees, my camera bag had grown to over 10kg. The new computer at 1.8kg was part of the bloat.

I've embraced the approach of using a lightweight tablet to transfer image files to the HDDs. I followed https://petapixel.com/2013/03/26/how-to-back-up-your-pictures-using-an-android-tablet-and-external-hard-drives/ but used Paragon software (https://www.paragon-software.com/free/exfat-ntfs-fat32-hfs-android/#overview ) together with Total Commander instead of Stickmount, to avoid rooting the tablet. (Those of you familiar with the Australian dialect will understand how awkward that last sentence is.) The only additional hardware I needed was a micro-USB hub to allow several USB devices to be mounted concurrently (https://www.amazon.com/Tanbin-Adaptor-Powered-Charging-Connector/dp/B06XD73SCH/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=micro+usb+hub&qid=1551944266&s=gateway&sr=8-6). With judicious selection of lens, camera bag weight, including a book, is now about 6.8kg.

So far, so good. But there is a niggling problem.

Normally I use the Adobe Photo Downloader in Bridge to read the camera SD card each day via a Windows PC. This does a good job of sorting images into automatically named folders, renaming the files if need be. However, now I have the DCIM folders for each day's shooting downloaded to the external HDDs. When I return to home base and wish to archive the images, Photo Downloader does not recognise an external HDD as a camera-like device, so I cannot directly use this software.

One solution would be to transfer all the files back to a large capacity SD card and let Photo Dowloader work with that. However, that seems inelegant. I wonder if there is any way to mount the external HDD to a Win10 PC so that it is recognised by Photo Downloader?

Any suggestions will be deeply appreciated.

[Mario]

You know that the IMatch Renamer can also rename files my many criteria and copy/move them into folders, creating the folders as needed?

[ubacher]

I agree with Mario that the renamer / Imatch can do just about everything.
I assume you want to put your files into folders by day - one folder named after the day and all images taken on that day into this folder.
The following renamer preset will do this for you:

[suttonbg]

Gentlemen,

Thank you. I now realise I had only been skating over the surface of the possibilities of Renamer. Just to clarify two points:
a. I need to temporarily import the folder containing the captured images to iMatch so that Renamer can find its focus. After copying and sorting, I then delete that folder from the database.
b. The thoughtfully provided formula ran into trouble when days and possibly months in the date were single digits. The apparent default of no leading zeros displaced the substrings. Instead, I used "{File.DateTime|format:DDMMMYYYY}" quite successfully.

Finally, and ironically, given what prompted my activity, I found this report today: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/carry-on-quandary-solved-as-qantas-relaxes-cabin-baggage-weight-rules-20190308-p512pd.html. Well, a lighter camera bag will not do my aging back any harm.

Again, many thanks for your prompt assistance.

[Mario]

The Renamer can do lots.
Most users never use it, or just the basics. And then have a hard time to find an external tool which does what the Renamer could handle....

If you just dump your files into a an "incoming" folder in IMatch, you have all the IMatch power at your hands when you rename the files, including full access to metadata, Metadata Templates to automatically fill in basic metadata like copyright or legal, automatic reverse geo-coding to make the GPS coordinates in your files more useful, automatic organization by keywords, location, ...

You can also import images and video into Windows 10 by connecting your device and then right-clicking it in Windows Explorer, then "Import images and videos...". It does not offer many options, a typical "Microsoft minimum functionality for mass users" app.

I've also tried Windows 10 "Photos" recently. The import had even less features (I could not even figure out how to set the target folder for import). Some nice UI ideas, through. I have written down some ideas I had.

[Aschenbren]

You're spot on, Mario. I used to not use the Renamer for the longest time and I was blown away by what it can actually do when you invest a bit of time to just figure it out.