From the course: Organizing and Archiving Digital Photos

Memory cards: The more the merrier - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Organizing and Archiving Digital Photos

Start my 1-month free trial

Memory cards: The more the merrier

“

- [Narrator] I think most photographers think about their memory cards at capture. And while they should, they're a very important part of our digital imaging pipeline, we want a card that has enough capacity, and that's fast enough to do what we need to do when we're taking pictures. But, if you think about it, they are valuable beyond that. You look at these little guys, and they're amazing. You know, gram for gram, and dollar for dollar. They're amazing backup devices as well. You just need a system to go with it. And that's what I'm going to show you right now, my system for using memory cards as a temporary backup device, not long term, just temporary to get me from the field back to my workstation and let the backup process run all the way through. Then I can release them, format them and put them back in the camera, but not right away. So when it comes to memory cards, I think the more the merrier, right? We want to have a lot of memory cards, and we want to have a way to carry them around, a way to store them. I like these little folding memory card holders because they don't take up a lot of space and they protect my cards. And they allow me to use my very ingenious system. (laughing) And that's tongue-in-cheek, okay? My system so that I know which cards are available and which cards are not. So if a card is available, in other words, I've already backed up the images that are on here or it's been formatted, then the label is forward. Okay, so I see that label I go, you know what, I'm in a hurry, I need to change cards. I can use any one of these. Now once a card has been used, and even if I've transferred its contents to a computer, tablet or smartphone, I return it here. I don't put it back in the camera. I put it here and I turn it around. This tells me that this card has been used, there are images on it. I may have uploaded them somewhere. But it hasn't been backed up two or three times over. Once I've done that, once I've come home, and I've put the images in my application, they've gone to the cloud, they've gone to two or three different hard drives, then I can turn this card over, and it's ready for use again. It's a very simple system, but what it does is it protects you during that very vulnerable state, when you first took the pictures, maybe uploaded them to your computer, but really only have them in one place. I don't like putting those cards back in the camera. I'd rather put them back here. And I love carrying these little guys around because it just makes it easy to enable this whole system. So when you're out shooting, and you've filled up a memory card, and you go, yeah, I've copied it to my computer, it's all good, no problems at all. I recommend that you don't put this card back in the camera. Put it back in your folder, you know your folding memory card holder, turn it around or whatever system that you use and protect that little card until you've gone all the way through your backup workflow. Then it can return to the camera, once again, for another round.

Contents