Digital Camera Memory - Your Guide To Care

Digital camera memory may be getting faster and cheaper all the time, but it still pays to look after your memory cards. In an ideal world we'd regularly trasfer all the data from cameras and sd cards to a PC or disc, but instead most of us leave images on our camera, forgotten until we next take a picture.

Bear this in mind if you have something powerful like a 16gb sdhc memory card - i.e., an sd card that packs a lot of memory. The higher the memory capacity of your card, the more likely you are to leave images on your camera until space runs out. A 2gb sd card may not sound like an impressive capacity, but that's enough storage for 15 rolls of old 35mm film images!

You probably don't need to go to the expense of buying a high capacity card unless you take a lot of high resolution photos or video - a 2gb memory card is fine.

Leaving something like an 8gb memory card in your camera can be risky. Having a high capacity memory card in your camera discourages you from making regular downloads to safe storage, which means your images are at risk should your camera get lost, damaged or stolen. You can replace a camera, but lost images are gone forever. Whilst your insurance might cover the camera, it won't cover the 8gb sdhc card you paid as much as £18 for.

Regardless of the capacity of your memory card, applying some basic care rules will ensure not only that your sd cards will have a long and healthy life span but also that your precious pictures don't suffer.

Be sure not to pull the memory card out of your camera the second you switch it off - data could still be transferring from buffer to memory card in your camera. SD cards not built to withstand rough treatment, so be gentle when exposing the metal elements, such as during removal or transit. Equally, don't attempt to remove the memory card when the camera is switched on; the memory could get corrupted.

Few of us have any idea how to do it, but it's actually a good idea to reformat your memory card after each data download. Because so many of us download our pictures directly from camera to our PC, we rarely remove the card. If you want to swap a card between cameras, however, or you want to clean the memory files, your camera most likely has a 'reformat' mode in its setup menu where you can wipe the memory card clean. You are less likely to encounter memory problems by doing this.

Worried that you've lost the images from your memory card? Don't fret. Images buried on damaged or corrupted secure digital memory cards can sometimes be teased out by specialist software packages - as long as you haven't written over the data already. Ask at a photo development lab or do a quick internet search if this is a problem for you.

To sum up, camera memory care is very simple and mostly common sense. SD cards may look small and unimportant, but they can carry a huge amount of data - stuff we want to keep. Extremes of temperature, moisture and general exposure are all enemies of digital memory cards.