How To Clear An Sd Card On Camera

A corrupt SD carte du jour is a digital photographer'southward worst nightmare. All those amazing photos ruined because a few 1s and 0s are in the wrong place? While y'all might be able to recover your images from a corrupt card, y'all don't desire to be in this situation in the kickoff place, and that means knowing how to format your SD cards properly.

RELATED: How to Recover Images Off a Corrupted SD Card

It also means y'all 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 photographic camera. Our pick, a 16GB SanDisk Extreme is just $11. There is no excuse non to exist using the best.

Deleting VS Formatting

When your camera'due south SD card is full, you're probably tempted to pop it into your computer, delete a few photos from it, so become back to shooting. Don't exercise this!

But deleting files from an SD card is a bad thought for a few reasons:

All the additional operations increase the chance of data getting corrupted.
Deleting a few photos is a very boring way to get space dorsum on a card.
SD card operation degrades with use.

Instead, you should format your SD cards when you lot run out of space (or whenever y'all want really). Formatting wipes the carte du jour clean and sets the Digital Camera Image (DCIM) folder structure upwardly once again. And it does all that without the downsides of just deleting things.

First, Save and Backup the Photos

Now, first things commencement. Don't format a bill of fare that contains photos yous haven't backed upwardly somewhere else. Remember, when it comes to data security, "One is none, and two is one."

RELATED: Don't Just Move Photos to an External Drive: That'due south Non a Backup

I recommend you import your photos into Lightroom and and then dorsum them up to a deject storage provider like Dropbox or Google Photos. This way you take 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 accept up that much space and deject storage is super inexpensive.

RELATED: How to Automatically Upload Photos From Your Digital Photographic camera

Reformat the Card in Camera

Once you lot're sure that you take all the photos of your SD card and they're fully backed up, it's time to format the carte du jour.

I'm going, to exist honest here: what I'm recommending is, in part, a flake of received wisdom. There are other ways to format SD cards and (as long as y'all don't try to change the format or add partitions or do anything else weird) they'll work too. Simply the standard communication from most photographers and every camera manufacturer is that the best way to format an SD carte du jour is to exercise it with your photographic camera to minimize the ways annihilation could become wrong. Information technology's also the quickest and most convenient mode since you practise not have to faff around with any additional software.

RELATED: How to "Clean" a Flash Drive, SD Card, or Internal Drive to Fix Partition and Capacity Bug

So, with the caveat that mod operating systems are good and yous tin can format an SD card however you like if you want to (and don't do anything other than format it), our communication is still to stick with the manufacturer recommendations and exercise it with the photographic camera.

The process varies a bit from camera to camera, just in general, it should be something like this.

With a Canon camera, go to Carte > Setup > Format Card. Select the card yous want to format and then OK. Your camera volition accept a few moments, and then you'll have a fresh SD card ready to go.

With a Nikon camera, go to Card > Setup > Format Memory Card. Select the card you want to format and then OK. Afterwards a few moments, yous'll have a formatted SD card.

If for whatever reason you're struggling to discover the format card pick, cheque out your camera's user manual.

The take a chance of something going wrong with your SD cards is pretty slim, just it can and does happen. Properly formatting your cards—and using high-quality ones to brainstorm with—is the best fashion to prevent information technology from happening.