How to Keep Your Safari Photos Safe Before You Get Home

Every safari has one story that makes everyone in the vehicle go quiet. The camera bag left on the roof of the vehicle. The memory card that suddenly stopped working. The suitcase that never arrived on the same flight. These things are rare, but when they happen they are total. The photographs of your whole trip can be gone in a morning.

The good news is that keeping your photographs safe on safari is simple. It needs no laptop, no special equipment and no technical knowledge. It needs one habit, done each evening, that takes about ten minutes.

Rule one. Never delete anything from a memory card while you are on the trip. Space feels tight on day three and loose by day ten. Pack more cards than you think you need, because they are small and cheap, and do not reformat a single card until you are home and your photographs exist in at least two places.

Rule two. Two copies in two different places, every night. Before you sleep, copy the day's photographs from your card onto a second device. A phone, a tablet or a small portable drive all work. Then keep the two copies apart. One in your camera bag, one in your main bag. One on your phone, one still on the card in the camera. If one bag goes missing, the other copy survives.

A phone is the easiest second copy. Most cameras send photographs to a phone over wifi using the maker's free app, and a full day of shooting copies across in a few minutes while you sit on the deck. Better still, your phone quietly backs itself up to the cloud whenever the lodge wifi is good enough, which gives you a third copy on another continent without any extra effort.

Wifi in the bush is often slow, and it is usually shared with every other guest in camp. Do not fight it. Upload at night, pick only the day's best hundred or so photographs, and leave the rest on the card. A slow upload that finishes by morning is fine. You are not trying to move everything. You are only trying to make sure a copy of the trip exists somewhere other than your luggage.

Dust, heat and water are the quieter enemies. Keep memory cards in the small plastic cases they came in, in a zipped pocket, never loose in a camera bag pocket with sand. A card that survives the whole trip can be killed by one grain of grit in the camera slot on the last morning.

On your last evening, do one final check. Your photographs should exist in two separate places before you fly. Once you are home, copy everything onto your computer and into a cloud folder before you even think about reformatting a card. Then, and only then, is the trip truly safe.

Once the photographs are safe, the hard part begins: choosing. Send us your selects, even a rough and overly large batch, and we curate, sequence and design a leather bound album around them, so the trip ends up somewhere you will actually return to.