Comments on: The Different Methods Of Cleaning Memory Cards

By: Mark MacVittie

Mark MacVittie — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:50:28 +0000

WOW..my head is spinning after reading all this. I still use my 512 cards from many years ago and have had not image problems. I have owned several differents digital camera’s since I purchased that original 512 and I copy my images from the card to my computer than I put it in my newest camera and format it. Of coarse this card is very limited on the # of images but has never failed me. My newest camera has 2 SD slots and I love it.

Jeff Plum said it best below toward the beginning

Jeff Plum Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 8:25 am

Format card in camera after transferring images to computer.

The KISS effect (keep it simple stupid)

Thanks Mark

By: Alex - Suffolk Wedding Photographer

Alex - Suffolk Wedding Photographer — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:45:46 +0000

Some interesting arguments, from both sides of the coin.

I’m perfectly happy with simply deleting the images off the card in my PC when I download them. The only time I’ve found that this causes a problem is when you use the same card in different cameras and they all create their own folder, which isn’t seen from camera to camera, so you wonder why the card only has X% capacity left when the camera says there are no images on the card.

Like most things in photography, there will be those who are ubertechnical and those who aren’t. For 99% of users, the way they are currently doing things is just fine.

It’s like the old debate about ‘pro’ vs ‘am’ film – the only difference between the stocks was that pro was frozen from the factory and am wasn’t. All the technical sepcs (colour, sharpness, MTF curves etc..) were, at least according to Fuji’s official book, exactly the same.

Just do what works for you.

By: lorie_wa

lorie_wa — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:09:06 +0000

@lu: What was the program/utility your son downloaded? I’d love to try it on one of my cards…

I had a catastrophic HD disaster this spring: both my main HD and the backup HD (a separate internal drive) fried themselves one night… the night before I had planned to do a major backup onto DVD. I lost about a month’s worth of pix. It would be awesome if they turned out to still be on the card. (I have never formatted it, just copied the pix to the computer through a card reader and then deleted the pix from the card. Is there any hope?)

lorie

By: Shaz

Shaz — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:41:53 +0000

Wow, that’s a whole lot of comments to read.

I’m a newbie and I hadn’t really looked into the which way to clean my memory cards. I understood a bit of what the article was telling me, but that also left me a whole lot more confused. Cheers to the guys who provided a solid argument and easy-to-understand advice. It makes sense now

By: Colin

Colin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:33:33 +0000

Many thanks for the clear and very helpful advice. I use an 8GB card and was wondering what to do once it was filled. I have backed everything up but had not cleared the card.
Thanks again.

By: Pat Bloomfield

Pat Bloomfield — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:39:46 +0000

@Benfamin, I’m not sure exactly how recover software works but I have heard that even if you do a low level format and write all ones and zeros to a hard disk, some software can still read traces of data. I saw and example of forensics software a few years ago and it was quite frightening what can be recovered from your hard disk.

I guess exactly the same principle applies to memory cards. The data may need to be overwritten more than once before it becomes completely untraceable.

However in this case I don’t think it will cause a problem with new images being written to your memory. Or at lease a lot less likely to be than simply deleting images.

By: Benjamin Cahill

Benjamin Cahill — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:15:39 +0000

@jeff plum:”In my 5D I can format a card in-camera, then use Sandisk Recovery to access all the images I just “deleted” off the card? Is that possibly because a format just deletes the TOC but leaves the images intact, albeit in a “please write over me cause no-one can see me anymore” state? Yes. That was my point. I think we’re both talking about the same thing anyway.”

And? What does it matter if they’re still there? Are you taking pictures of things you shouldn’t be?

By: Henry

Henry — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:02:30 +0000

I have a nikon D80… does anyone know at what level the format function operates on this camera?

By: Dave Hahn

Dave Hahn — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:31:26 +0000

@lu – The pictures were still on the card because only the table of contents was deleted, not the actual picture. If you had filled your entire card up since those pictures were taken, they would have been overwritten – but apparently you had never filled the card up to 100% so they were still there.

By: Lu

Lu — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:48:07 +0000

Just wanted to share what happened to me. I took pictures at a zoo. When I went to download them to the computer, the disk said it was empty. My son downloaded something from the internet and was able to recover all the pictures for me. Along with those pictures I had taken that day, were a few from a year before that I thought had been deleted long ago. I usually hit the quick format buttons on my Nikon D70 to delete my pictures. Rarely do I go to the menu and do it from there. But I do format every time I download my pictures to the computer, which is generally the same day I take them. So how could I have reformatted that disk over and over again, but still have pictures on there from a year ago?