Bridges Loc: Memphis, Charleston SC, now Nazareth PA

It depends on how you access LR. I always bring up NX2 from the shortcut on my desktop, last night I got lazy and when Windows popped up with several choices of how to download a card, I just told it to use NX2. Rather than open the program and let me make up a new folder for the shots, it just downloaded them into the last folder I had open in NX2 and I had to move them after creating a new folder. Windows can mess you up if you allow it to.

jimmya Loc: Phoenix

Some will dispute this but on another forum I frequent we've discovered that, at least it appears this way, SD HC cards like to fail when used for storage. They also like to fail if used as viewing devices. So we encourage upload at the end of every shooting day. Once you know your images are safe re-format the card. We've also discovered that this seems to lengthen the life of these cards.

I've had two SD HC cards fail, neither for this reason. Reason? I don't know. One failed while I was shooting and showed me a red 00:00 on the cameras screen while I was shooting video. The other failed after shooting at a major event and after my upload. I'm fortunate it didn't fail prior to upload in the second case and that I had the following day to reshoot in the first case.

All in all we've found that these cards simply love to fail.
Why so many camera makers have gone to them I can't say but the facts remain as written above.

Bridges Loc: Memphis, Charleston SC, now Nazareth PA

I've had cards that seem to have failed but actually did not. If you get to the end of the card and try to put 12mb on to a card when there is only 4mb of space left, it will sometimes "hang" up and give you weird info like it has failed. In these cases I turn the camera off, take the card out and re-insert it. Usually I can push the review button, bring up a shot or two that were going to be throwaways and secure the card for downloading.

jimmya Loc: Phoenix

That's interesting. What happened with mine after the red
00:00 is my computer, using an external reader which I do all the time, tole me "no device found" or some such. The camera wouldn't format the card either. So the card is trash and I lost all that day's video.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

Exactly what I said to do:

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

You should never do it this way unless you don't want to use LR. Doing it this way requires many more steps to catalog your image files in LR. After doing it the way you did, you'd have to create a folder, then move the image files you just downloaded, open LR, find that folder, then import them from that folder; or you could possibly synchronize that folder, I'm not sure if both ways work - but in any case, there are way more steps to do if you plan to use LR to catalog your images.

Bugfan Loc: Toronto, Canada

To address the first question, yes you can treat the memory card like a hard drive, as long as the images aren't deleted you can download them as often as you like. However ...

Memory cards are called flash memory. What's vitally important to know is that know they are not forever.

First of all flash memory is only good for about ten thousand read write cycles after which it begins to fail. Sometimes it goes sooner, it depends on the environment in which the card was used and how it was treated.

Usually you don't notice it failing because the integrated controller maps the bad bytes and works around them. However in the longer term you do notice as the capacity and the performance of the card starts to degrade.

The controller also has built in algorithms for correcting data errors but there's a limit to how many times they can be made to correct failing data.

Yes I know there is a lifetime warranty on many of those cards but few people use it. Usually well before the card starts to fail you're already replacing it with a larger faster one. And in those instances where you do want to have it replaced, do you actually still have the receipt? That's why the manufacturers offer the lifetime warranty, it costs them almost nothing.

The next thing you need to know is that they should not be used as archives. If you must store your pictures on them forever you need to place each card in the computer at least once a year and explore it a bit as you would a hard drive and you need to have write protect off while you do that (with the SD cards of course). That refreshes the memory and renews all the bits on the card. If you don't do this the data will gradually fade until you get to the point where you can't read it at all.

Frankly, if you want or must archive images on offline media, you're better off using DVDs and burning the images to those. They too aren't forever but you should be able to get a few decades out of them before you may have to copy them to fresh media.

Finally, as someone already mentioned earlier, while you can delete images using your computer it's vitally important that you format the card in the camera it's going to be used in. Technically the formatting specs are common to everything but alas there are occasionally minor differences that will make it impossible to use a card in a given camera unless it was formatted there. Thankfully it's not an issue the other way around, any card you place into a reader or a computer can be read by a computer as a rule assuming of course there's nothing wrong with it.

One other minor, or perhaps major, issue ... if you're going to store your pictures in a cloud find out where the cloud is and whether it's being administered or owned by an American company. If the cloud is not in the States and the company is not American it's safe to store your images in a cloud.

On the other hand if your images are being stored in a cloud that is owned by an American company, regardless of what country the cloud or the company is physically located in, the American government can demand that the company give up your data to the government without a warrant and the government is not constrained as to what the data will be used for.

Essentially you do not have a right to the privacy of your own data with any American company. I live in Canada and we have come across this issue many times. The only way to guarantee the privacy of your data in Canada is to not use an American company to store it.

mjp

In the LR import screen the second checkbox at the top right under File Handling is "Don't import suspected duplicates"

If you try to save to the same folder as the first import it may ask if you want to use unique names. It would be best to create another folder to save them to. You could also create a new LR catalog and folder to save them in.

If it's just a backup copy you could just use Windows to copy them to another folder.

I initially save them to an external drive, have time machine back them up to another external drive, and save the JPEGs of the good ones to SmuMug.
Jim

joe_flippin Loc: Texan living in Brazil, SA

I don't want to sound dumb, but I guess I am, what is LR?

10MPlayer Loc: California

I do it a lot like jeep_daddy. I download the pictures to my computer. Then I put the card back into the camera and format. That cleans off the pictures and sets the card's file system up for the next go-round.

I also invested in iDrive to back up my computer hard drive. I back it up a couple of times a month to make sure if I drop the laptop like I did a few months ago, I have it all backed up in a safe encrypted place. Even if the house burns down and I lose everything, my important files will be stored away for me to retrieve whenever I want them.

jimmya Loc: Phoenix

Hey Player.

Your instructions are exactly what we all need to be doing with SD HC cards given their failure rate. Shoot, upload, format - simple isn't it.

crimesc324 Loc: West Palm Beach, Florida

Sure, even if you deleted them there is software that will retrieve them unless they have been overwritten

Bugfan Loc: Toronto, Canada

No you're not dumb, we're insensitive. We get so wrapped up with acronyms we forget that not everyone knows what they mean. Perhaps this forum should maintain a dictionary?

LR is Adobe's Light Room application.

This is an interesting solution for photographers who have a variety of needs but don't want to use photoshop. The application allows you many editing tools as well as organizing tools and even tools to build slide shows and stuff. If you've never heard of it check it out online.

kschwegl Loc: Orangeburg, NY

You do not need to reformat the memory card after you transfer the photos. Just delete them. Formatting buys you nothing, in fact it has a down side. File recovery software will NOT work. When you delete a file, you remove it from the "FAT" (File Allocation Table). The FAT is an "address" book that has the location of every file on the card. The data (photo) is still out there. When you take a new photo, a new entry is made in the FAT and the old date is overwritten. You don't loose storage. A format overwrites EVERYTHING, FAT and old data. Your computer sees the card as a disc drive. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I worked on disc storage systems for the 44 years of my working life (the last 12 with EMC). I'm now retired.

Michael66 Loc: Queens, New York

In the end, you need to find what you are comfortable with.

For photography, I have a Windows laptop and two external disk drives. I copy the images to one drive and run SyncToy, from Microsoft, and sync the first drive to the second. I have eight SD cards that I rotate through and keep the images on them until their turn is up in the camera. Then I format in-camera just before I use it.

The only images on the laptop are the ones I am manipulating or showing to people. I'm newly returned to photography, so I don't have all that much, but this is really all about the proper backup of files, regardless if they are pictures, music, taxes or docs.

And that second external drive, I stuff it in my backpack that I go to work with every day. Off-site storage. Heh.