A corrupt SD card is a digital photographer’s worst nightmare. All those amazing photos ruined because a few 1s and 0s are in the wrong place? While you might be able to recover your images from a corrupt card, you don’t want to be in this situation in the first place, and that means knowing how to format your SD cards properly.
It also means you should be working with high-quality SD cards. Over on our sister site, ReviewGeek, we took a look at the best SD cards for your camera. Our pick, a 16GB SanDisk Extreme is just $11. There is no excuse not to be using the best.
Deleting VS Formatting
When your camera’s SD card is full, you’re probably tempted to pop it into your computer, delete a few photos from it, and then go back to shooting. Don’t do this!
Just deleting files from an SD card is a bad idea for a few reasons:
- All the additional operations increase the chance of data getting corrupted.
- Deleting a few photos is a very slow way to get space back on a card.
- SD card performance degrades with use.
Instead, you should format your SD cards when you run out of space (or whenever you want really). Formatting wipes the card clean and sets the Digital Camera Image (DCIM) folder structure up again. And it does all that without the downsides of just deleting things.
First, Save and Backup the Photos
Now, first things first. Don’t format a card that contains photos you haven't backed up somewhere else. Remember, when it comes to data security, “One is none, and two is one.”
I recommend you import your photos into Lightroom and then back them up to a cloud storage provider like Dropbox or Google Photos. This way you have your photos nicely organized and, even if something happens to your computer or your external drive, they are safe. Unless you shoot an incredible amount of RAW files, photos don’t take up that much space and cloud storage is super cheap.
