Yet, I need a little more info. You mentioned reformatting the memory card, but not how to do that.

Also, you said a memory card needs to be updated from time to time. Can you be more specific? Is it time to dump my memory card after taking 4000 raw pics with it? Does it affect the photo resolution, color, etc to keep using the same memory card over and over? Thanks so much, Arlinka

I’ll limit myself to correcting misstatements.

Jamesc359 is incorrect; his information is based on how hard (and floppy) disks worked 20 years ago. “Formatting” a card (which is really an incorrect term nowadays) simply means rewriting the File Allocation Table (FAT). The data itself (the pictures) is still there and can usually be recovered. Jamesc359’s test was flawed in that he only tried 2 pictures. If he’d filled the card with 1000, he would have found that most, though not all, were recoverable after formatting.

Tips 1, 3, 4, 7, 11-13, and the bonus are all right on. Tips 2, 6, and 8 are debatable (see below). Tip 9 isn’t wrong but probably won’t help (again, see below). Finally, tips 5 and 10 are just plain wrong (expanded below).

BTW, that’s a pretty good durned good batting average for information collected from a variety of sources. The authors of this article are to be commended.

OK, on to the tips:

1. Stop shooting on disasters. YES!!!!! The single most important thing you can do.

2. Deletion on the computer vs. the camera. On modern cards, it probably doesn’t matter. An individual cell’s lifetime is roughly 100,000 write/erase cycles. The card’s “mapping” firmware spreads wear across all cells, so you’ll more likely get a million erase cycles before you start seeing failures, regardless of where and how you erase things. Long before that happens, your shiny and massive 8 GB card is going to get replaced by a terabyte card whose price has fallen to $15.00, of which $14.00 goes for the huge plastic package that Best Buy insists on putting it in. FWIW, I erase my cards in-camera, using “format” if I have a lot of images and “delete all” if I only have a few (a decision that is based entirely on the speeds of the two operations).

3. Safe removal. This only matters if you’ve made changes to the card, such as deleting an image. But it can’t hurt. I always take care here.

4. Multiple cards for safety. This is like diversifying your stock portfolio. I don’t rotate cards, but I do carry spares. If I was making a living from photography, I’d rotate cards as well. Or buy a really expensive camera that writes to two cards at once.

5. Don’t fill your cards. Note that the evidence for this advice is a store manager, hardly a tech expert. I know of no technical reason why filling your cards would matter. (In response to Torgeir Frøystein, flash memory always has “spare” space to handle these situations.) If you’re in the midst of a shoot, your card is close to full, and you have a spare moment, by all means change your card so that you don’t get a nasty “CARD FULL” message in your viewfinder just when you finally snapped the perfect image. But don’t stress about it. It won’t make your cards more reliable.

6. Periodically reformat cards. As a practical matter, there is no difference between deleting and reformatting, unless you have astoundingly buggy software (e.g., circa 1989) on either your computer or camera. But formatting is often the quickest way to delete all images (especially if you have some so-called “protected” images). Also, see #7.

7. Format on the camera you’re going to use. It can’t hurt. Theoretically, the FAT, FAT32, or VFAT filesystem is a standard that is supported by all cameras and computers. In practice, there might be “tiny” variants that turn out to break everything. Your camera knows what it wants; it’s not likely to screw up.

8. Switch your camera off first. This is very unlikely to matter. The memory cards are designed to be inserted into and removed from devices that already have power (in particular, that expensive card reader attached to your computer always has power). The grain of truth here is that some cameras (notably the stupidly designed Canons before the 40D) screw up writing pictures if you open the card door too soon after taking a series of shots. If your camera has a flashing LED, wait for it to be quiet before you take the card out. See Matthew Miller’s comment.

9. Keep your camera up to date. The FAT filesystem and its variants are well understood. Unless you have a very old camera, firmware updates aren’t likely to matter. One exception is if you buy a memory card bigger than 2 GB; it’s remotely possible that older firmware might not handle it but a firmware update would.

10. Keep your cards up to date. Long before this is necessary, you’ll decide that your old cards are useless because they’re so small. I have some 64 MB SD cards that still work fine; the smallest available from buy.com are 512 MB and they only cost $2.

11. Don’t let batteries run down. Yes!!! ‘Nuff said.

12. Don’t shut off the camera. This depends on the particular camera. A lot of cameras will happily finish writing data even if you move the power switch to “off”. But on all cameras, if you open the battery door before it’s finished, you are going to be up a creek without a paddle. On pre-40D Canons, opening the card door gives you the same unpleasant result (points to all other manufacturers, and I’m a Canon shooter). This is closely related to tip #3: before you disturb the world, make sure the card has finished its work.

13. Common sense. Hey, it’s common sense.

Bonus: Again, yes. As several commenters have pointed out, something written on the outside of the card beats having a photo that can get lost by formatting. But 99% of the people in the world are honest, and only 10% of them are so lazy that they wouldn’t get the card back to you if you make it easy. Label your cards! On the outside, even if you need to use a 6-point font!

Finally (yeah, I know, you’re tired of listening to me) comments on the comments:

Graeme Smith: Yes, name brands are generally better in both reliability and speed. And yes, counterfeiting can be a problem.

Brett Veenstra: Wow, news to me. I don’t know enough about LCD technology to figure out why this happened. Even with the flash card, I find your experience surprising, but I learn something new every day.

Chrissy: Your paranoia is admirable. It’ll be a long time before you lose a photo.

jkpaul: My guess is that either your friend was very unlucky, or there was some extreme force involved. The design of CF connection pins is such that it’s very hard to bend them. I’m not at all nervous about changing CF cards in my camera. However, regarding your worry about the speed of an adaptor, in the absence of tests to the contrary I would tend to assume that an adaptor wouldn’t slow things down by a measurable factor (to be fair, that’s just an educated guess).

Fred Albrecht: Yup.

John Bokma: You’re right that only badly designed electronics would misbehave when the power switch is turned off. Unfortunately, there are all these bad designers out there…

ismaelj: Sorry to contradict your experience, but formatting a card will have ZERO effect on performance. Flash is not disk. There is no advantage to having things be contiguous. I can give you references if you want.

Callie: if your card isn’t misbehaving, no repair is needed. If you think something is wrong, formatting it in the camera will return it to a pristine state. Your son is completely wrong with his claim that you damaged your hard drive by removing the card “unsafely”; that idea is utterly absurd. If he’s under 13 or over 19, point him at my Web page (see Google) and tell him to ask me. If he’s 13-19, you’re already up a creek, sorry. :-)

So, which is which?

Thanks!