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If data is being transferred to or from the card and that process is interrupted, it is quite possible that you will lose some or all of your photos. Don’t pull a memory card out of your camera or card reader when data is being written or read from the card I usually fill a hard drive to a maximum of 90% and then start writing to a new one. I never fill them, because their performance suffers a lot when they are full. One of the reasons that I love shooting with large memory cards is so that I have tons of head room to shoot a lot of photos and not worry about overfilling the card.įYI, I also have the same mentality with my computer hard drives. Don’t fill a card completelyĮven though most memory cards are built really well and have all kinds of intelligence in them, it is not a good idea to fill a card completely. When I was working at Lexar and a customer would call me about a corrupted memory card, one of my first questions I would ask is “What card reader are you using?”įolks, those memory card readers have intelligent controllers inside them, just like the cards! I have seen way more cards corrupted in a reader than in a camera. I can not tell you how many times I have seen professional photographers take a high quality card out of a $10,000 camera and put it into a cheap no-name reader. Once you have downloaded your card and have the images in more than one place, you should format that card before its next use. Speaking of formatting, it is a good idea to format your cards after each shoot They like to be formatted a certain way and each manufacturer does it their own way. I have seen people shooting with a Canon camera, pull the card out and start using it in a Nikon camera. Speaking of this, it is not a good idea to pull a memory card out of one camera model and putting it into another without formatting. You are reading this correctly… I do not format in one Canon camera and move it to another. I am currently shooting with the Canon 1D X Mark II, Canon 1D X, Canon 5D Mark IV and Canon 5D Mark III, and I format the card in the camera I am using. And you should do this on the camera your are shooting with. This is just bad information! You want to format the cards in the camera. I have seen countless web sites which tell people to format their memory cards on your computer. Format your memory cards in your camera, not on your computer Once you have downloaded to your computer and backed up the images, then format your card to use it again. Just pop in a new card and keep shooting.
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Don’t do it!Īnd heck, memory cards have gotten so inexpensive and large, that you should not have to delete images to save space. Deleting individual images from the card using your camera is a great way to scramble the FAT Table. Your camera is awesome at taking photos, but it is not very smart at managing the data on your memory card. I see people (including professional photographers) doing this all the time and it is a really bad idea. Do NOT erase images from your memory card in your camera!Ĭlarification: What I mean by this is: Do not go through your photos and delete them one by one using your camera.
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