7 Travel Items That Make Life on the Road Easier With a Camera

You stand at the baggage carousel for an hour, the belt stops, and your suitcase is nowhere in sight. When your camera, laptop, and a week of unbacked files are part of that trip, the small things you pack around your gear decide whether a bad travel day turns into a lost shoot.

Laura BC has traveled solo with her cameras for years, and she starts her list of seven travel essentials with the simplest one: an Apple AirTag. She recommends buying at least two. One goes in your checked suitcase, which is how she found her own bag after an hour of waiting, sitting off to the side of the airport where someone had pulled it from the belt. The second goes in your camera bag, tucked into a hidden pocket and never clipped to the outside. Thieves know what an AirTag looks like, and a visible one tells them exactly what to remove. You can name each tag in the Find My app, so the map always shows which bag is where.

Everything valuable rides in the cabin with you, and she extends that rule to chargers, which most people toss into the suitcase to save carry-on weight. In a big city, you can replace a lost MacBook Pro charger in an afternoon. On a small island in Thailand or the Philippines, you could go days without one. The only piece of gear she checks is her travel tripod. The rest fits in a Brevitē backpack that holds her Sony a7R V, Sony a7C II, two lenses, a drone, and batteries, while still looking like a school bag. As a woman traveling alone with a lot of expensive equipment, she weighs that discretion as heavily as capacity, and she explains when she still reaches for her larger WANDRD bag.

The power bank story is the one that catches people off guard. While planning a trip to China, she learned that power banks there need the CCC mark, the country's compulsory product certification. She then saw it enforced firsthand during a transfer in Shanghai on her way between Europe and Bali. Passengers never left the terminal, yet security pulled uncertified power banks from the line one after another and dropped them in the bin. Hers carried the mark, so she kept it. Her advice is to buy a CCC-certified model no matter where you're headed, since plans change and a dead phone in an unfamiliar airport leaves you without maps, ride apps, or a way to book a bus.

Power banks have become one of the most tightly regulated items in a carry-on. The FAA already bars spare lithium batteries from checked bags, and in 2025, airlines and regulators kept adding rules. China's Civil Aviation Administration banned power banks without 3C certification, the same mark she describes, on domestic flights starting June 28. Southwest began requiring passengers to keep power banks visible while using them, and Emirates prohibited using them onboard at all from October 1. Each airline also sets its own capacity limits, usually expressed in watt-hours, which should be printed on the case. If you fly with camera batteries, a drone, and a phone you depend on, check the battery policy for every carrier on your itinerary, including the airport where you connect. A layover counts, as that Shanghai transfer shows.

The remaining items go further into how she actually works on the road. She pushes back on the common advice to buy a local SIM card at the airport and explains how she lands with data already running. Her travel adapter charges several cameras, a GoPro, and a phone at the same time, which makes it useful during long layovers when she edits between flights. Her storage setup pairs a 4 TB SSD for editing with a sturdier hard drive for a second copy, filled every day instead of at the end of a trip. She also has a simple fix for the flimsy earbuds airlines hand out on long-haul flights, built around a pair of Bose QuietComfort headphones and an accessory most people leave at home.

See the full list and how she packs each piece in the video above.