Memory Cards Needed for Safari (What I found Surprised Me)

Since you are going to be taking a million photos on your African Safari, one of the things you need to ask yourself is how much memory you need to store all of those Safari photos and how big your memory cards should be to allow you to capture all the memories without them getting filled up.

How many memory cards do you need for an African Safari? You Need at least Two 64GB Memory Cards when going on an African Safari. This memory is sufficient for you to take 2000 high-quality photos per day for a 10 day Safari and you will not need to carry an external device to transfer the photos each day. Let’s look a bit more deeply at the average number of pictures you expect to take on your Safari and how this and the size of each picture will affect the size of memory cards you need to carry.

How Many Memory Cards Should I Take?

You should take two 64 GB Memory cards to your African Safari. 

I got this figure after doing some research using a Canon EOS 700D Camera: when preparing an article on how beginners can improve their safari photos

I took a photo of the same subject 7 times; each at a different image size setting. The data collected is illustrated in the table below.

Image Size	Average File Size  per photo (MBs)	Minimum File Space  Needed on memory cards if you’re transferring pictures to a laptop each day	Total Minimum file size needed on memory cards for a 10 Day Safari (No Transfer to laptop)
Small 3 (S1) (Lowest Quality)	0.16 MB	320MB	3.2GBs
Small 2 (S2)	0.86 MB	1.7GB	17GB
Small 1 (S3)	1.4 MB	2.8GB	28GB
Medium (M)	2.6 MB	5.2GB	52GB
Large (L)	5.52 MB	11GB	110GB
Raw + Large	22 MB	44GB	440GB
Raw (Highest Quality)	25 Mb	50GB	500GB

I tested a Canon EOS 700D (Rebel T5i) and found that a high quality large photo (5181x3456Px) takes up about 5MBs of space). This file size usually varies depending on  the level of detail in the picture and the number of colors in the photo. Assuming that you will be talking an average of 2000 photos per day and if you don’t intend on transferring them to a computer at the end of the day, you may end up using 100Gb of space on a 10 day Safari. 

Carry enough memory cards to avoid running out in the middle of your Safari. 

How many memory cards for for safari videos

The amount of memory you need if you are  planning to take safari videos will depend on the quality of the video and how much video you intend to record.

Just a few videos to supplement photos

If you will be recording a few clips to add to the pictures you already have, then the 2 64GB cards will be sufficient for you. This is because, according to the table I showed earlier, you will only need 110GB of  space for your photos and this leaves you with 18GB of space to store the videos you will have

Vlog videos more than just a few minutes

However, if you will be recording a vlog or video that will be more than just a few minutes, 128GB will not be sufficient. 

One way you can get around this is recording each day, then transferring the recorded videos to a separate device like the laptop. With that configuration, you would only need the recommended 128GB of memory from the two 64GB cards.

You won’t find cards available to buy when on safari

You may be thinking, “Cant I just buy more memory cards if my cards get filled up?”. 

Trying to shop for extra gear when you arrive in Kenya is not advisable for a number of reasons: 

1. You are unlikely to get good quality memory cards for your camera unless you are in a large city.
2. The cards will cost a lot more than how much you would buy them for when in your home country
3. You are not sure that you will find a memory card that is compatible with the camera you are using.
4. Delivery service in Kenya is very inefficient and you are unlikely to get the memory cards on time if you order for them online.

My advice is that you get all the memory cards you need before starting your journey to avoid getting frustrated when the cards you have fill up and you are not able to get an easy alternative to solve your problem. 

Should You carry a laptop to transfer the photos

If you don’t want to buy a new memory card, one of the options you may want to consider is carrying your laptop for you to transfer all the photos at the end of each day. 

This will have two advantages

• You will be  able to store away each day’s worth of photos so if something were to happen to your camera, you would not loose all of the photos.  
• You will also have a machine you can browse the internet with while on safari ( let me mention here that you are unlikely to find very high speed internet when out on safari. You will have great internet in the city but the connection is really bad in the safari lodges. This is unless the lodge has invested in a satellite internet connection)

However, the downside to this would be that you have extra weight for you to carry around and the stress of one more device you need to worry about.

I would recommend that you don’t carry the laptop with you to the safari if your only reason for carrying it is to back up your photos. This is especially true if your laptop is heavy or bulky.

What About uploading Safari Photos to The cloud everyday

Another option you may have considered is uploading all of your content to the cloud after the end of each day. 

The challenge with this option is that you still need to carry some type of machine with you to do the upload. 

On top of this, internet speeds in the Safari country are bad and you will have a rough time trying to upload high quality images to your online storage

Many cards with small storage or one card with huge storage?

Another question you may have pondered about is whether you should have many memory cards that have low capacity or one large capacity memory card to store your safari pictures

I did some research and found that  carrying multiple cards is a better option than just one high capacity one. You will not be putting all your eggs in one basket so if something goes wrong with one card, you will be able to recover  some of your pictures.

Having multiple cards comes with a few downsides which you will need to consider:

• It will cost you more to get the same memory capacity when you have multiple cards compared to having one high capacity one.
• You are likely to lose one of the memory cards if you are not very careful
• The challenge of swapping out memory cards in the middle of a safari

The other possible downside to having multiple car

I recommend that you have the two 64GB cards and an emergency spare 32GB memory card in case you run into problems with the first cards. However, this might be overkill for most beginner photographers.

What kind of memory cards should I buy

If you are looking to buy memory cards for your African Safari, you may want to consider the SanDisk Ultra 64GB Memory Card (available on Amazon). It is a mid-range memory card that has thousands of great reviews on Amazon and I think it’s a good price. 

There were a number of other memory cards that were more expensively priced than this that allow for faster writing and reading but I think for most of you, this particular memory card will be sufficient for your needs.

Conclusion

If you would like to learn more about how to improve your Safari Photography, you can check out the in-depth article I wrote on how to take better safari photos. I wish you the very best as you prepare for your African Safari.