We get this question a lot…how do you download images so quickly? On wildlife trips we might shoot 8000 images in one day….after a week in Africa we might have 60,000 images. Workflow involves a lot of elements from downloading, culling, labeling, and finally backup to storage systems. The first part is downloading your images, and this can take 5 minutes….or over an hour depending on your download chain of devices. There are three things to evaluate…your flash card speed, your flash card reader speed, and how fast the port is on your computer.
First, flash cards. Right now a new benchmark of speed is being set with the newest CFexpress cards with read/write speeds of 2500MB/s (actual speeds, even though they are rated for over 3000MB/s). That means your 512GB flash card is going to download in mere minutes. CFExpress 4.0 are the fastest cards out there. Standard CFexpress cards with read/write speeds of 1500MB/s are still very fast. We are using Sandisk Extreme Pro CFexpress cards and they download very fast, and have plenty of buffer speed (for our needs) shooting wildlife at 20FPS. We normally get around 5 seconds of shooting at 20FPS before the speed starts to slow a little. Release the shutter button, and the buffer clears very fast. There are faster cards for sure, but we haven’t felt the need to get them. And I have never had a Sandisk Extreme Pro CFexpress Flash card fail….even after accidentally running through the washing machine and dryer (don’t put flash cards in your pocket!).
Next is your flash card reader, and this is often the bottleneck when it comes to slowing your download speeds. Most card readers out there are USB 3.0 or similar….with download speeds of 5 Gbps. USB 4.0 has a download speed of up to 40 Gbps, and Thunderbolt has download speeds similar at 40 Gbps. You can do the math….using a Thunderbolt or USB 4.0 reader is significantly faster than any USB 3.0 configuration. We use a thunderbolt Sabrent CFexpress Type-B (for Nikon) card reader.
The last part of the download chain is your computer port speed. If you are using an older computer it won’t matter if you have a fast CFexpress card and card reader, the port speed may not be able to utilize it. We are using newer Apple computers all using the latest Thunderbolt ports. When we use our Thunderbolt card reader with our fast CFExpress card, the download time for a 512GB is about 5 minutes. That is over 10,000 45MB images…plenty fast.
So if you are frustrated by your download speeds, take a look at the three elements…flash card, card reader and port speed. Make sure they are all using the fastest technology so you can start culling those wildlife images sooner.