After taking your lovely travel photos of the jungles and white sands of Costa Rica, if you don’t have your handy dandy notebook or WIfi compatible Internet set up, you might not be able to transfer your pictures right away. As I am an avid photographer and am very possessive and somewhat neurotic about my photographs, simply having them stored on a little tiny chip in my luggage doesn’t exactly make me feel secure.

However, there are a number of portable storage devices and viewers that will allow you to download your images from your digital camera’s memory card and store them in safe place until you are ready to upload them to your own computer when you get home. Think of this as an external hard-drive back up for your digital photos.

There are many different types of viewers available, and depending on your budget or disk size, you will need to do a little research product snooping to find the one that fits best for you.

For the beginner looking for simple, affordable and small, JOBO offers two models that fit those exact three categorical criteria. “GIGA 1″ is the company’s easiest to use model and is available in 3 sizes ranging in price from about $159.00 to $229.00. The GIGA can store files can store JPEG, RAM and MP3 files.

Personally I liked the mid-line model called “SPECTATOR” because it has a live photo viewer much like most of the modern models of digital camera today have. The viewer is a 2.5 diameter inch color LCD screen. By seeing your photos pre-production you can manage them in a timely manner and avoid having to fess up to the drunken photos you took at the cabana bar.

Check jobo for current prices and keep an eye out, the company is currently a new updated model GIGA ULTRA that will soon be available.