It would be useful if someone, somewhere, could collate all the known "best practices" of card management and provide "footnotes," that is, substantiation for the technical claims. (Lloyd Chambers? Shawn Barnett? Rob Galbraith? Thom Hogan?)
I ain't that guy. However, it seems to me that the recommendations would be divided into several partitions:
- Technical best practices
- Workflow concerns
- Security concerns
For instance, I like Gato's suggestion of keeping exposed cards separate from the camera gear, because no one would steal a card alone but someone might steal the camera bag. That's a security issue, but not a technical one.
Of course, that might not be good advice for me personally. I recently lost my Kindle in my very own house. I remember the last time I had it in my hand and yet I cannot find the @#$! thing anywhere. It's been missing for two weeks. Highly annoying. You can imagine how likely I am to keep track of a card if I were to remove it from the camera while shooting. Sticking a filled card in a pocket—or "somewhere"—in the middle of shooting would be tantmount to blindfolding myself and tossing it into a landfill over my shoulder.
This is only one reason why I assume my own practices are virtually worthless to most people. I end up using a wide variety of cameras, and I'm disorganized and lose things easily.
Of course, maybe that makes me more suited to recommend my practices, because I'm such a doofus in this respect that if it works for me, it'll work for you. I don't know. What I'm saying here is that you have to take your own personality, psychology, and abilities into account when you do stuff. For example, I am not going to try to take a backup hard drive offsite on a regular basis. It's a very good idea, and I can see the sense in it; but I also know exactly what I'd do: I'd swap the drive at the offsite location about three times, and then I'd stop. Presently I'd forget about it, and then, five years later, I'd think, "Holy crap, my former neighbor Annabelle still has that hard drive of mine that I was using for offsite backup. And they moved to Oklahoma two years ago. Wonder if they still have it?" Meanwhile, my five-year-old backup is sitting on a shelf in Annabelle's laundry room in Tulsa and has spiders living in it. You get the point.
At any rate, I virtually never use more than one card in a day, and never take more than one card when I go out photographing. I end up almost literally never swapping cards while shooting. I might have done it, but only in the early days with one of my first two digital cameras.
I know some people don't have this luxury.
For the D800, I have three SanDisk Extreme Pro 16GB cards. I just put a clean one in the camera, pointed it out the window, and shot until it filled up. It recorded 278 NEF (Raw) files of about 47.5 MB each, and 278 "Normal" JPEGs of about 9.5 MB each. All that data took 9:41 to download from the card to the computer.
That's with the 36-MP D800, of course, which records 7360x4912 files. Most people shoot smaller files (we all did, until fairly recently). Also, of course, there are bigger cards available, too. (Thank you, video.)
Now, it's quite possible that it's a holdover from shooting film for so many years, but 278 images is overkill for me. That's about eight rolls of 35mm film, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times in my life I've shot as much as eight rolls of 35mm film in one day.
Of course, "YMMV." How much we shoot is entirely a personal choice. Some people are "heavy" shooters (like Garry Winogrand); some people are "light" shooters (like Walker Evans). Back in my school days, there was one local teacher who used to advocate shooting 10 rolls a day, and another who shot very sparingly, 100 rolls a year or less. Actually, I think he shot less than 50 rolls a year, but that seems fantastical and you might not believe it if I said it, so I'll say 100.
I experimented, once upon a time. Severely limited my shooting for a spell, then forced myself to shoot a lot for a spell. I discovered I don't do as well when I shoot too much. It makes me "scattered" and too casual. I do better when I try to make every shot tell, and try to get "the" shot rather than "spray 'n' pray."
(Besides, I hate editing too much work. I'll tell you that story some other time.)
So I seldom hit the limit of the card. I generally have the opposite problem. I often shoot too few images on a card. It's sort of pointless to transfer 12 images (or 20, or 32, or whatever) to the computer and assign them their own folder. So I sometimes just leave the card in the camera for a while as it fills up. There have been a few times when I've hit the wall and filled up a card completely (not with the D800; I'm just speaking generally). But most of those times are just because I'm lazy and started out shooting with a half-full card.
If I'm going somewhere where I know I'll be doing a lot of shooting, I just make sure I have an empty card. That's enough.
If it was not enough—even once—I'd probably buy bigger cards. I don't mind paying for cards these days. Even good ones have gotten relatively inexpensive, and photography is my favorite thing. I can justify the expense.
The upshot is that the way I "think" is that there's a card in the camera and however many pictures the card will hold is how much I can shoot. Bear in mind I'm not a pro or anything close to it. If I were on some critical mission (almost never happens), I'd take a spare card as a backup. I've never experienced a card failure in recent years, though, so I admit I'm relaxed about that. I'm more worried about the camera failing, and much more worried about the battery running out of juice.
Such as it is...
Anyway, here's what I do:
- Take one card along in the camera, and never swap cards "in the field."
- Never reformat in the field.
- Never erase single images on a card (okay, except on those occasions when I mess up and start shooting on a half-full card. But that's a mistake, not a conscious practice.)
- Download the card to the computer using a card reader. The card then goes in a stack on top of my preamp next to my desk where I keep all my cards. I then take a different card and put it back in the camera.
- With the new card in the camera, I "Delete All" in the camera. I don't reformat unless there's any possibility that the card was last used in a different camera. For me, that means often with SD cards and seldom with CF cards, because I currently only use CF cards in the Big Dragoon (the Nikon).
I guess the only thing that needs explaining is why I put the just-used card at the bottom of the pile and put a different card back in the camera—although you've probably already figured that out. It's just so that I retain any particular batch of images on the original card for a while. My system backs up hourly, and sometimes it's a few days before I get around to looking through new images. Mostly, I'll have backed up the images and opened them in Photoshop before the card they came from is re-used. It's just a simple additional failsafe. I've never needed it, but I like doing it.
For example, the card I just filled up as a test is backing up right now. There's a clean card in the D800, erased and ready to go. The card with all the test images on it is at the bottom of the pile; it won't be erased for at least a few days. And possibly a few weeks, unless the weather gets friendlier.
I should mention that I have no real authority for my practice of "erasing all" rather than reformatting every time. I do it because there was one occasion, with one camera, and one card, where reformatting did not erase the old images. Or at least I thought it didn't—it's possible it was operator error. I can't give you chapter and verse. I don't remember. As I say, I use lots of cameras. But ever since then, I've preferred erasing rather than reformatting to clean a card before reuse.
I guess the only thing left to say is that one thing I don't do is to get rid of my old cards. I have all sorts of old cards floating around here, and that's probably not the greatest practice. I tend not to use them—I use my latest "set" of cards almost always. It would probably be more organized to formalize that and get rid of all the sundry older ones.
I'll think about that.
Mike
UPDATE: After filling a card with the D800 I figured I'd try the same thing with one of my new Sony 16 GB cards and the Panasonic GX1, to see how much it really holds, but lordy, I don't have that much patience. The buffer doesn't clear nearly as quickly, and the camera says it can hold almost 800 Raw+JPEG images. I'm going to take its word for that. You can shoot that many pictures in a day, but while you're beavering away at that I'll be over here in the shade of a tree, resting. Shooting 800 pictures in one go is just too much like work.
I'm left thinking I maybe should have gotten 32 GB cards for the D800 and 8 GB cards for the Micro 4/3 cameras.
Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Keith B: "Just before your last step of deleting all in the camera, you might want to add this: Whenever placing a 'fresh' card in the camera, hit the playback button and see what's on the card. If you don't remember offloading those files, don't erase, reformat, or shoot with the card until you've confirmed the files have been safely saved into the system. Ask me how I know...."
Shawn Barnett: "I remember standing next to Rob Galbraith in either the Lexar or SanDisk booth at some trade show, asking them whether there was a way to detect when a card was nearing failure. The answer was no. When the card starts having errors, it's failing. There's no telling when that'll happen. Exhaustive testing of a card will just add to the wear and reveal nothing until actual wear builds up, when its too late. Since then, I've decided we're all on our own.
"The practices I follow and recommend are:
- Spend at least a little more than the cheapest card you can find.
- Don't format the card until you've copied your data to at least two locations.
- Format your card in the camera you'll use it with.
- Switch to newer cards after two years or less just to be safe.
"I try to keep a CF and an SD card in my truck for those times I forget to load the latest review camera. I also carry a few in a holder in my camera bags.
"I try not to put them in loose in a pocket, for a very good reason. I still carry and use a SanDisk Ultra II 8GB that the washing machine repairman recovered after a year in the 'gunk basket' of my washing machine. Its images were intact, despite the rust caked on the outside of its casing from the nail that was jammed against it in the basket. This disobeys my number four guideline, but it makes me feel like I'm getting away with something.
"I think Rob would be better able to answer your query, but I'll check with the card makers again to see if anything's changed on that longevity question, among other items."
[Shawn was Senior Editor at Imaging-Resource and is now a Senior Editor on the reviews team at Dpreview. —Ed.]
Andrew Hughes: "I would add one recommendation to Shawn's short list: Always buy your cards from a super-reliable source. As an example, Amazon is good, Amazon resellers less so. The likelihood of buying a counterfeit card is high and I would wager that failure rates on counterfeit cards are higher than on legitimate ones."
psu: "Note on formatting vs. delete-all.... Computer 'file systems,' including the storage systems used on flash cards are really just big multi-level lookup tables. At the top hierarchy is the whole system. At the bottom are the pieces of memory that make up the file itself. When you format the card, you just wipe the top level table, and replace it with an empty one. This makes all the files 'disappear' because the system can't find the pieces anymore. But all the pieces are still there. Similarly, when you delete a single file all you do is walk down to the entry in the file system tables that is keeping track of where that file starts and removing it, so you can't find the file anymore. The data is 'still there.'
"Now, like all computer programs file systems have bugs. So, it's possible to 'erase' a single file or a whole file system and for whatever reason maybe some of that old information leaks back in and you think you see things that you just 'deleted.' The only way to know for sure is to actually walk every block of memory in the card or disk and physically erase it by changing all the bits (but that's slow). And even that might not be enough. Those little memory cells just hold charge, or magnetic pulses or whatever, and they can hang around even if 'erased.' So some enterprising dude can come along with special hardware and read it all off. So if you really want it erased what you should really do is not write zeros, but rather write random gibberish over and over again until not even the magnetic remnants of the old data are there underneath anymore. Bottom line: there isn't much difference between format and erase. But format is faster (fewer things to remove). I generally use format."
Mike adds: Shawn tells me he also reformats. He feels there are fewers errors that way than after multiple erase-alls when using cards in many different cameras.
Advice I've gotten is to reformat in camera each time as this resets the file allocation tables on the card (I think that was the fancy term used). Haven't had any problems in doing this but would like to hear experts on the subject. It's the same number of button pushes either way for me.
Posted by: Mel | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 12:41 PM
Mike,
About the Kindle, did you look in the magazine basket next to the john?
You're welcome!
Posted by: Ed Kirkpatrick | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 12:42 PM
I am exceptionally paranoid about losing images when I hit the road for a few days. In my D800, I use both a 16gb CF card and a 16gb SDHC card for redundancy. After each day of shooting, I back up the SDHC card on a netbook hard drive and also on a large flash drive which are kept in different locations in the car. At the moment, I have two 16gb CF cards and use them mainly as a fail safe in the camera for the much-cheaper SDHC cards.
If you do buy SDHC cards, I highly recommend the newer UHS-1 cards. The time it takes to copy everything over to a computer using them is significantly less than a standard class 10 card and the prices have gotten to be very reasonable for the SanDisk Ultra and Extreme versions.
Posted by: Josef | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 01:06 PM
I have all of my cards numbered on the back with a label maker. I carry them in a card case with the number label up (backside up). If the number is showing it is good to use. When a card has active images it is placed with the front of the card showing (non-number side up).
I too would join you at the "blindfolded over the shoulder trash dump" if I just put the used ones in my pocket. Been there done that, never again.
I have always formatted my cards in the camera and have never encountered any kind of a problem (been doing it for years). I am old school computer and was taught many years ago of the need to de-fragment my drives. I have carried that habit over to my memory cards and I am paranoid that just erasing the card will cause newer files to be fragmented when they are written to the card.
I won't reformat/reuse a card until the images have been transferred to my computer AND also backed up to the in house backup drive with the midnight backup process.
After a day or two they also automatically get uploaded to Carbonite for the offsite backup.
Posted by: Bob | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 01:08 PM
Here's my "standard practice". So far so good, no mess-ups.
I have an 800e, so I use both SD and CF cards. I've standardized on 16 GB. I keep one primary set in camera and two backup sets in a card wallet (these are face up) that I keep in my pocket (when at home, it's in the camera bag). I have my camera set to backup the primary card to the secondary card as I shoot. I'm not worried about speed. I've never filled a card, but if I do I will put the set of two from the camera in the card wallet face down and replace it with a backup set.
After the shoot, I import to Lightroom, and a portable hard drive backup. The card goes back in the camera. Before the next shoot, I format both cards in the camera.
Posted by: Dan Gerth | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 01:20 PM
"(Besides, I hate editing too much work. I'll tell you that story some other time.)"
Hidden in this little parenthetical, there is a lot of evil truth about the digital age.... I know
Posted by: Richard Tugwell | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 01:32 PM
I have one rule for memory cards. I only ever format them when I'm in front of my computer and I've just unloaded the card onto one disk drive, manually copied the directory to a second drive and imported the files into Lightroom to verify that the photos are not corrupt (although I don't generally look at every photo at this point). I then immediately stick the card back in the camera and format it. I never, ever format cards while shooting and I never delete photographs from cards.
These days it's easy to own and carry enough cards for any day of shooting, event, trip or whatever that anyone should ever have to format a card while photographing. Seems way too easy to screw up and lose something you didn't want to lose otherwise.
Posted by: John Sparks | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 02:02 PM
An advantage of standardizing on one card size (which I have not done; I use three currently, in two different formats and two different cameras) is that you know what the "remaining shots" number should be for an empty card. So, when you put a card in the camera, if the wrong number comes up, you've loaded a non-empty card. One more way you might notice. (If you're not formatting/deleting in the field, this won't matter as much, you'll just run out of space sooner; perhaps MUCH sooner if the card is full.)
Posted by: David Dyer-Bennet | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 02:12 PM
BTW, there are lots of reasons not to let images build up on a card. I don't know what your process is for cataloguing (DAM) but I like to make sure that when images are imported from the card they are at the very least tagged with IPTC image location information. All images from one shoot generally have the same UPTC template(s) applied. I'm shooting a lot of stuff destined for stock photography so that helps me, but in any case it's an easy first step in getting some organisation into your archive. Image location is almost always worth something in the future. If you let images build up on a card before importing them it makes life more difficult. If you do import them after a shoot and leave them on the card, sure most software will detect duplicates, but if you have already culled images from the import destinations, you won't be a happy bunny.
NB what's all this about importing a few images into their own folder? That suggest that maybe you don't have any DAM process in place. I have all my images (25,000) in ONE folder. (Actually that's an exaggeration, I have them in 4 separate folders, but that's another story)
Posted by: Richard Tugwell | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 02:18 PM
On my 5D MkIII, I have 3 CF cards (fast, 32 and 2 16) plus I have a slower 64 card in the SD slot. Now, Canon fucked up something in the Mk3 as the SD slot is seriously slower than the CF.
So I have my cam set to record on the CF slot and use the SD in the case of overflow. But I usually change the CF card when full. Mind you I often use the 6 pix a second fast mode with my slow finger, so the 400 - 500 RAW pix that fit on a 16 MB some times dont last too long in a session (Portrait, Concert, Performance ...).
Whenever I make a pause of 20 Minutes or so I tke the full CF card and copy all to my SD. This method gives me a maximum capacity of 2x 16 + 32 + 64, or maximum 128 Gigabyte or maybe 4000 shots in raw, which also is roughly the maximum number of shots I can get out of my 4 batteries.
I rarely fill up all 4 cards, but it is good to know that I wont run out of storage before running out of juice.
Oh and I format my card in camera, too. Main reason is that is so much faster than deleting all shots.
Posted by: Manfred | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 02:27 PM
I always carry at least one spare card in the camera bag with each of my cameras, and swap in the field when the card is nearly full and I have a convenient pause in shooting, With SD cards, I set the write protect tab when I take the card out of the camera, but it goes back in the card case and in the bag in the same place the fresh one came from. However, I do get all my cards from different manufacturers to make it easier to tell them apart.
When I put a fresh card in the camera, I do a quick review of what's on there, to make sure it's shots that I remember as having been uploaded, edited, and printed. the card is then reformatted in the camera. Note that I always reformat, rather than delete all. Anecdotal evidence (i.e. hearsay :) ) from a number of web forums and usenet newsgroups seems to indicate that the majority of people who suffer from corrupted memory cards have been in the habit of deleting images rather than reformatting. The only time I've had a corrupted card was with a brand new card that I neglected to format before use (because the camera displayed "No images found"). However, delete all obviously works for you, Mike - format works for me. I'm just saying. :)
When I get home, or at some convenient time thereafter, I upload the files to directories on the computer organised by camera and upload date. My main cameras (Pentax K20D and Samsung GX10) automatically place each day's shots in separate folders on the card, and I keep those subfolders as well. The write protect tab is reset to write-enabled, and the card goes back in the camera bag.
The computer's main hard disk is backed up to an external hard disk periodically, usually when I've completed a batch of editing, and includes the original camera files (raw and JPEG) and the edited files, as well as any special intermediate files from any stitched panos or HDRs. I used to periodically copy the external hard disk to another disk at a friend's house in another town, but then the social situation changed. However, the online print service I use retains copies of every JPEG I've upload for printing (which is everything that wasn't obviously total rubbish).
I'm not suggesting everyone should follow my procedure, or even that it's logical or self consistent, or that there aren't ways it could be improved. But it's worked for me over the last 5 years or so.
Posted by: Alex Monro | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 02:42 PM
Heh, when I first got into digital, I made sure to get a card that fit about 100 images at the usual quality settings I worked with.
This was because three rolls of film with 36 exposures each works out to 108 exposures.
Posted by: Peter | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 03:41 PM
Change pockets are the perfect size for memory cards, and you're probably not using them for anything else, so they're fairly easy to remember.
Of all the card corruption issues I've seen around, a large majority have involved cardreaders. And with CF there's always the risk of bending a pin in the camera, which is probably worse than losing any single card's worth of photos for most of us. So I no longer use them. It's not a big deal to connect the camera to the computer via USB and download photos directly.
Posted by: Timprov | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 04:09 PM
I number my cards and use in sequence. Load via card reader to two different drives, put in bag. Format next numbered card in camera after checking images, repeat.
Posted by: Rusty | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 04:55 PM
I've only ever lost images when I break my own routine. Thankfully never with a clients images but annoyingly I've done it twice while travelling.
My cards are marked and used in order. It does much the same thing as your pile. Cards are reversed in my little LowePro Card wallet when used and also in a different pocket to avoid grabbing one in error. I make a copy in the field to a Hyperdrive and two copies at the computer and then immediately format the cards. It's a cleaner way than erase all and formatted cards are easily recovered if neccessary. I only format in camera because I've seen a couple of people get into the field only to realise they've formatted a card to the wrong type of file system and they're now useless for the day. I never format a card in the field so if a card has images on it it's from that session.
Breaking that last rule while travelling is the one that got me in trouble. Lesson learned.
Gordon
Posted by: Gordon | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 05:14 PM
I have nine digital cameras right now (redundancy). Three of them take CF cards and the rest take SD cards. I have backup cards available to the cards in the cameras (more redundancy). I don't know the sizes of the cards in each camera but it makes no difference because I never shoot the cards full before moving the images to the computer. I hardly ever shoot JPEGs. I edit in the camera before downloading, deleting images as necessary rather than downloading the duds and then deleting them. I'm a pretty light shooter and, when in-camera editing is considered, I usually don't have a lot of images on the cards per download. I use card readers--either a SanDisk that was relatively expensive or a Kingston that was pretty cheap. They seem equal in function to me and, of course, having two provides a bit more redundancy.
After downloading and processing the Raw images, I back them up on three portable hard drives (even more redundancy). I check to be sure everything is copacetic and then I reformat the cards in the cameras. I never use a card until it has been formatted in the camera.
I live by The Rule "If anything bad can happen, it will". So far, I've had nothing but good luck with this system. Still I can't help but think it's only a matter of time....
I would never consider removing a flash card from the camera and putting it down some place I expect to remember. Too many times I've been working in the yard, gotten hot and sweaty and removed my glasses only to have to blindly search for them later (See Rule above).
Posted by: Dogman | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 05:48 PM
Your kindle is down the back of the couch, beside the tv remote. Why don't you ring it?!
Posted by: Rory O'Toole | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 06:28 PM
YMMV - While I'm the sort of guy who can come away from a glorious dawn at Mesa Arch happy with 50 shots, my personal record is filling a 16Gb card and flattening a full battery in less than an hour, shooting Puffins off a headland in Iceland. The point is, you never know when you will need to change your card!
Before a trip I wipe all my cards by deleting the files in a card reader, then I use the "red flag" system in my Tamrac card wallet to mark the full ones. I never format a card in the field. After a shoot I download to the PC and make sure I have a second copy ASAP. Simple and foolproof.
Posted by: Andrew Johnston | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 07:03 PM
Maybe it's because I have only a year's experience with digital cameras, but I'm surprised by all the talk about swapping cards. When I bought my X-Pro 1 a year ago in preparation for a three-week photo holiday in eastern and southern Turkey, I had no idea how many shots would fit on a card, so I bought two Sandisk Extreme 128 GB Class 10 SD cards, and didn't have to swap the first card ever. The price through Mike's B&H link was half the retail price here in Australia and I thought a better deal than smaller cards. Am I ahead of the pack on this? The big card works fine.
Posted by: Rod S. | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 10:05 PM
Now let me say up front, I am only talking about personal work on SD cards, not my pro jobs......
Go to Aldi and buy Sandisk Extreme cards, normally $12.00 or so for 4 or 8gb
Format all cards in camera
Place in storage box in camera case
Shoot shots, delete nothing
When full write a big F on the card
When home, load card to Mac and Copy to B/up drive, then burn to DVD.
Store card in card folder with attached tag indicating content
That's it folks, at $12.00 per card and about 400 Raw files why reuse it, it makes a good extra Back up, I am pretty sure my shots are worth 3-4 cents each. And I shoot worry free!
Posted by: Brad Nichol | Friday, 15 March 2013 at 10:24 PM
I follow the same rule several other posters have mentioned about keeping the cards in a case and showing their state by which side is out (label side is empty, back side is full). I got the idea from Thom Hogan, and it seems to work well. My rule of thumb is to get cards that are big enough for a busy day's shooting and use a fresh card every day. That way I rarely if ever have to change cards in the field, which is when I'm most likely to make a mistake and erase something I should have. If I'm on vacation or otherwise away from my computer, I make sure to have enough cards to last the whole trip at one card per shooting day, plus maybe an extra card or two just in case.
Posted by: Roger Moore | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 01:02 AM
I'm not sure "the cloud" is what I think it is, but if it is, why not put the backups in the cloud? Whenever you'd been out shooting seriously, take one minute to stick them up there. When you're not out shooting seriously, just let the images stay on the card, because there won't be that many anyway. Anyway, if the cloud is what I think it is*, then it seems like it should be the answer to a lot of these problems.
*massively redundant on-line storage.
If I were looking for that Kindle, I'd look off the end of the bed, or around the edges of the bed, where it could have slipped between the bed and something else. That's where mine would be.
Posted by: John Camp | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 01:29 AM
Hi Mike,
Regarding the off site backup, I've got that solved rather nicely with the offering at www.backblaze.com
They provide an unlimited backup to their servers for under $60 per year.
I really love their software which basically backs up everything it finds on the computer that's changed or new. (Not programms though only pictures and documents).
I have no affiliation to them and think that us D800 owners are severly stressing their business model with the large files. But I wish them all the best and can only recommend the service.
Posted by: christian kurmann | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 05:24 AM
I'd be interested in building and maintaining the memory-card page
Posted by: Bojidar | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 06:02 AM
I don't know from cards, don't shoot much digital and my 3 Lexmark 2GB cards seem fine after about 4 years. The absolute maximum amount of film I ever shot in one day was 100 feet of Tri-X at Elkhart Lake race track in about 1973. I actually ran out of film before the end of the day.
The cameras? Two Olympus Pen F's, one with a medium tele and one with the 38 f1.8.
Posted by: John Robison | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 10:04 AM
Switching in the field makes me think of the times I swapped out color film for black and white in the middle of a shoot, and then tried to put the original roll back in the camera, trying to accurately count exposures (did I start at "0", or did I start at "2"?).
I got some very arty double exposures that way, one of them was awarded first place in a college art show (which supports my theory that the good photographers are also good editors).
Put me in the doofus camp.
Posted by: Jimmy Reina | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 12:44 PM
For the few weeks of Kobo ownership I was forever losing it around the house, I never, ever lost a real book; curious.
Now I make a point of strictly placing it in one of two locations, as I do house keys.
I do misplace filters, often.
Posted by: Ross Chambers | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 08:46 PM
I just took inventory of my cards. One 128MB card that I used in my first digital, a 4MB Kodak easy share, and the rest are 1-2 and 4GB cards. I have never reformatted a card, but i usually don't switch cards between cameras. Before I got my IPad (a raffle prize), I stored my pics on CDs via those programs that allow music to paired with the pics and played via a DVD player on the television. Soon after the iPad, my 10 year old computer disc drivers got corrupted and probably will stay that way, so I have recently been viewing the pics on the iPad. When the cards have been getting full, I have been retiring them and buying new 4GBs. I have one old bad (got submerged)128MB card with Bahamas pics on them that I did download to easy share software so not lost.
As for the missing Kindle, in the WC also check on top of the medicine cabinet. Also check your laptop case AGAIN. Also check under the bed, near the legs expecting to see it axially, across it's thinnest plane. You might find a wallet there, too. Did you put it in a REAL bookcase?
Posted by: Cmans | Saturday, 16 March 2013 at 11:07 PM
Mike, whenever I lose the iPad it's either in a stack of magazines or horizontal on top of books on a bookshelf. My better half always finds it somewhere near the commode. I suspect she snatches it from either above and plants it in the bathroom to justify her superiority theories.
On the other hand, THANKS everybody for the backup stories - caused me to increase my full backup frequency, and an hour later I was hit with the "FBI" extortion malware on my PC. It's laughably stupid in concept, but makes it appear as though your computer is locked up, your password useless, and unless you pay "bail" your files will be erased in xxx hours. Easy to recognize, (after the fact) difficult to clean.
Cheers!
Gabe
Posted by: Glt Bandy | Sunday, 17 March 2013 at 08:55 AM
With an image ingester like Photo Mechanic, it can import only new photos incrementally, i.e. previous imports are ignored. That way I keep writing to a large card until it's full.
Formatting a 16 or 32gb card every time I download ~30 photos from a day's shoot seems unnecessary. Formatting the whole card in-camera feels like I'm reducing the card's lifespan.
Posted by: John McKelvie | Sunday, 17 March 2013 at 04:47 PM
For copying card contents to your hard drive, I heartily recommend Digital Image Mover.
It allows you to automatically sort your files into date-based directories while copying, so if you shoot multiple days on a single card, you don't have to sort them out afterwards. I also use it to rename the files while copying (in my case, to the full date and time when the picture was taken), so I don't end up with the meaningless names the camera bestows on the files.
It can also detect if files have been copied before, so you won't end up with multiple copies if you forget to wipe a card before using it again.
As for erasing vs formatting: The way flash memory is made, even overwriting a file won't wipe it, since the wear-leveling software means every other location on the card gets written to first before the location you want to delete.
Posted by: Bernard Scharp | Monday, 18 March 2013 at 04:16 AM
On finding lost stuff. When you have exhausted the possible consider the impossible. In this case the impossible is the place is where it should be, ie the place you looked for it first but for some reason did not see it. Works for me.
Posted by: Richard Parkin | Monday, 18 March 2013 at 05:39 AM
As a working journalist and commercial photographer, I have a slightly different approach and method due to my needs.
First off, I often work with multiple camera bodies, shoot a lot and by that I mean 300+ frames a day, occasionally more than 1500, and all in RAW. I've been worried about losing files, as we all are, from the get-go but except for the mechanical failures that I got from the old IBM Microdrives, remember them?, I've never had a card go bad. Even put one through the wash and it was fine. As a result I've stopped worrying about card failure. I’ve always used Sandisk since the Microdrive days and they have never let me down. There are loads of counterfeit cards sold on E-Bay so get yours regardless of the brand from a reputable dealer.
My method is rather simple: treat each card as you would a roll of film. By that I mean before you walk out the door to shoot you load up your bag with “fresh film” meaning that your cards are formatted and ready to go. You never format a card in the field as you could be destroying pictures.
All my cards have a label on them with my name and phone number on the front; as does all my gear. If it gets dropped and found it can be returned to me. On the back my cards have a strip of yellow electrical tape on them. The cards go into a red ThinkTank card wallet with all the fresh cards facing with the labels up. The wallet has a tether on it and that is clipped to my bag so that the wallet can’t fall out. I prefer the red wallet because it’s easy to see. I want all my gear to be invisible except for the card wallet. You never want to lose that do you? As I go through the shoot I place each full card face down in the wallet so that the yellow side is up telling me even in low light that it’s been “exposed”. This is just like how with medium format film the exposed film has a different color paper backing so that you don’t re-expose it. Simple. Since I’m often in a rush to switch cards this prevents any fumbling when the action is happening. I can do this on the run if necessary.
When I get to the office I transfer all cards to my workstations’ internal and external backup hard drives before formatting the cards which then go back into the wallet label side up.
When in the field I will sometimes have to edit as I go to speed up the editing/sorting process on deadline when I’m transmitting from the field. If I’m using my laptop I keep my “exposed” cards in the wallet and only format the cards once the files are again backed up on two drives at the office. The cards acting as my redundant file system in the field.
Over the years I’ve gone from the then huge 1GB Microdrive, to 2GB then 4GB cards with each group upgrading to the next to fastest speed made since download time is as important to me as write speed when shooting sports or news in the field. With the purchase of my D800 I went straight to all new Sandisk Extreme 16GB cards for all my cameras without a worry. I’ve never lost a card, never had a failure and always have my data, except when it’s in the camera, in two places for security.
Posted by: Jonathan Castner | Monday, 18 March 2013 at 01:35 PM
Key things I do to limit loss are simple, I only use cameras with dual cards for proffesional work, set to back up mode. I never edit images in camera, meaning I don't delete any images until they are on the computer. This avoids errors and corruption created by the card controller as it tries to fill space vacated by the deleted images. The used cards then sit unused until the session is fully edited and stored to backup drives and archived. THEN I will reformat in camera and reuse. Obviously I have many sets of cards to be able to do this and only use top brand name (lexar, sandisk...) cards from reliable resellers.
Posted by: Michael Steinbach | Tuesday, 19 March 2013 at 10:38 AM
Rod S. -- I certainly swapped cards a LOT more in the early days of digital than I do now; memory cards today are much larger relative to image sizes than they were then. I had a 2 megapixel Epson camera and around 32MB cards, eventually a 6 megapixel DSLR with 256 MB cards, and now a 12 megapixel DSLR with...up to 32 GB cards. 128 times the card space for double the megapixels. (That's not my complete history, but covers both ends).
I don't think I've ever actually filled the 32MB cards, and I've hit 1,500 shots in a day now and then (like, for two roller derby bouts, with halftime events). (Yeah, the estimate says that won't actually fit with some RAW compression settings, but it has.)
Posted by: David Dyer-Bennet | Tuesday, 19 March 2013 at 08:38 PM
Yes, Mike, there should be a "best practices" resource. Herein, my contribution to the scattered information.
I had a scare recently, a working digital photographer's nightmare--apparently irretrievable files on a CF card--from which I learned a best practice, albeit one specific to the combination Lexar Card Reader (USB 3.0) and MacBook Pro Retina (Mid 2012). It might be applicable to other reader-computer combinations, but I have no experience of that.
I learned (from Lexar) the best practice that I should always fully insert the card in to the card reader *before* plugging the reader in to the MBP's USB port and attempting to download to the computer.
I'll add that I also learned that Lexar has exemplary customer support, for owners of the "pro" line of cards, which for me meant that they shipped me replacement cards, and then upon receiving my damaged CF cards, retrieved the files shipped them to me on disc--all at no cost to me, other than patience.
Patrick
Posted by: Patrick Snook | Wednesday, 20 March 2013 at 01:49 PM