I AM PLANNING to carry and use an actual camera (remember those?) for the bulk of photography during the trip, rather than my phone camera.  I find the real camera, an Olympus TG-4 "Tough" Stylus model, to be easier to deal with and to give better results than the camera on my phone.  (I'm one of those old fuddy-duddies who believes the primary use of a phone is communicating verbally, not taking pictures... call me old-fashioned.  When I buy a phone I won't spend upwards of $1,000 to get the one that takes the most magnificent photos.)

My camera does not talk to the internet.  Has no idea it exists, even, as far as I know, and certainly has no idea of what a "google" might be.  I like that about it.  It keeps pretty much to itself, minds its own business, and does its thing without drama.

The rub will come when I want to take images from its storage card and embed them in this journal.  When at home it's a simple matter: I sit down at my desktop computer (also a throwback to earlier days, I know), pull the SD card from the camera, insert it into the card reader attached to the computer, and voila!  I'm in business.

My intention while on the road was to do basically the same thing, except using my tablet computer in place of my desktop model.  Of course, it's proving to not be so easy and straightforward.

First off, my tablet computer has a micro-USB port but my external card reader- bought for use with the predecessor of this tablet- has a USB-C plug.  "Okay, fine", I thought, "surely someone makes an adapter to do that conversion."  Yep.  Found one on Amazon for $6.  In fact, it was really $3 each but they're sold in pairs so I now have two of them.

"Problem solved", I thought.  Wanna bet?  This evening I sat down at the kitchen table to play with my new wonder-gizmo and prove to myself how clever I am.  Arrayed in front of me on the table were: the camera, camera "kit bag" (the thing I use to keep all the bric-a-brac related to the camera from spreading all over Good's Green Acre at every opportunity, and immediately getting lost), the external card reader (extracted from said camera kit), the aforementioned and newly-arrived USB type converters, a couple spare SD cards for test purposes (also extracted from the camera kit), my tablet computer, my phone, and eventually my passport.

"Why", I know you will ask, "is it necessary to have a passport for any of this?"  Good question.  You are clearly a keenly discerning and insightful reader.

The answer lies in the fact that, try as I might, I could not get the tablet to acknowledge the fact that the card reader was connected- however precariously and indirectly through the adapter- to the tablet.  The tablet could see the internal SD card, but gave no indication that it was aware there was another one outside, connected at the USB port.

After fiddling around with what settings I could find, and doing a bit of surfing, all to no avail, I decided to see what happened if I plugged the external reader into my phone (which has a USB-C port).

Success!  The card reader's little blue "There's something talking to me" indicator lit up, and the phone admitted it could see the card reader.  But (you knew there had to be a "but" coming, didn't you?), no files showed up.  "Oh yeah, right" I thought, "this is one of the test cards, which I erased a while back."  

When I unplugged the external reader to change cards, the phone told me that the internal SD card was now corrupted and asked if I wanted to format it.

NO!  OH HELL NO!  Everything I value is on that card: music, photos, data... The last thing I want to do is trash it all.

Enter the passport, or more specifically my nice passport holder.  It came equipped with that special little tool that you need (in the absence of a good old fashioned straightened-out paper clip) to eject the tray that carries the micro SD card and the SIM card.  I ejected the tray, re-seated both the cards, and reinserted the tray.  Yay!  Everything is back to the way it should be.

The next experiment was to pull the actual SD card from my camera, stick it in the card reader, and see if the phone could see the files it contained.  Yep, it could.

So, I've isolated the problem to something about the combination of the card reader, the USB conversion cable, and the tablet itself.  (It should be noted that both the phone and tablet are Android devices, but not from the same manufacturer.)

I really want to use the tablet for composing journal posts: it's bigger, handier, and I can type better on it.  An ugly kludge workaround for getting pictures into the posts might have to be:

• Use the tablet to write the draft of a day's entry, inserting placeholders where the photos are to go.
• Pull the storage card from the camera and attach it to my phone using the external card reader I already have (and that I know will work).
• Use the phone to edit the post, insert the photos, write the captions, and finalize the post.

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Scott AndersonI’m not sure, but I think it’s a mature cedar-apple rust gall. I’d never heard of this but found it scanning for galls and cedars or junipers. And whether I’m right or not, I’m glad I found it because it has one of the most astonishing life cycles I’ve ever heard of.
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2 years ago

Keith AdamsTo Scott AndersonMy Google image search led me to the same conclusion. And yes, what an amazing life cycle those fungi have!

I will go past that tree again soon to see if I can spot some of the other stages. They should be fascinating.
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2 years ago

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I've just done the experiment and it's not actually as bad as I feared.  Yay!

The alternative is to keep playing monkeys-and-typewriters with the tablet, trying to find an external card reader that it will recognize so that I can bypass the phone.  But that could get expensive in a hurry and leave me with a pile of unneeded card readers.

An even more expensive option would be a new tablet, but that's a plunge I'm definitely not ready, or willing, to take at this point.

Since the phone method seems to work okay, I may just live with it.

[EDIT 3/10/2022  Within a couple hours of my posting this, Mike Ayling was able to point me in the direction of a better solution.  His comment led me to look for and install the Olympus image share app, which uses the camera's built-in Wi-Fi capability to, among other things, transfer files wirelessly to a phone or tablet.  So now my process will be:

• Shoot pictures with the camera as planned
• When preparing a new journal post, start the camera's Wi-Fi and  connect to it from the tablet
• Review and transfer the images I want to place in the journal
• Write the post, selecting and inserting the transferred images directly from the tablet without recourse to an external card reader or the phone.

Brilliant!  Thanks, Mike!]