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Comment by CondensedBrain | Hacker News Reader

Someone on a long trip with no reliable high speed internet could shoot in raw and never worry about space.

With my camera (Canon 5D Mark III), that's about 26,000 still images. On a busy day, I might take 200 photos. There is no way I would take a hundred day long trip and put all of the photos on a single card and risk losing the whole thing. Even if I could, I would absolutely use multiple smaller cards just to reduce the single point of failure.

"On a busy day, I might take 200 photos. "

I can easily see a pro taking 20000 pictures during a sports weekend or an airshow. I took more than 3000 during an IndyCar day with several races.

Yep. I work for a top motorsports company and our photographers take hundreds of photos in a very short time (we have multiple drivers), leading to many thousands over an entire race weekend.

The images are uploaded immediately and used for classification and analysis via ML.

At the IndyCar race I was shooting from a parking garage roof and there was a guy who took pictures and videos of all cars and streamed them to the team for engineering analysis. this was new to me but makes sense.

What series do you work for if I may ask?

Sorry, I have a habit of making comments and not following up in checking replies.

I work for each NASCAR series, so Cup, Xfinity, and Truck. We also work with ARCA, NHRA, and IMSA but I'm not sure if this particularly level of photography or application will ever make it down to the lower series.

Yeah, I'm not doing action photography, so my numbers tend to be much smaller because I don't need to do a lot of bursts.

I wouldn't trust one card with that amount of pictures. I use several 64 GB cards. That way if one goes bad, not all is lost.

just back it up frequently?

Sure. But why take such a monster card?

so you don't ever have to switch those tiny cards?

i have several which I often switch daily. They don’t take up much space so taking them is not a problem. Really big cards are often more expensive per GB and now you have a single failure point. Even reviewing pictures on the camera is a pain if you have too many.

Obviously this changes if you do 4K or 8k video. There a 1 TB is probably very useful.

of course when talking about storage you don't usually buy the largest capacity available if you are worried about money... same goes with hard-drives... you buy 8TB even if 10TB are available, because they are cheaper by the TB... but that should make 200GB and 512GB sd cards cheaper, at least

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