Copyright Robert S. Donovan “Just delete the photos you don’t want,” one friend suggests when you ask what to do when you’ve finished downloading a memory card to your computer. “No, no. You want to format it in the camera to be safe,” chimes in another And still a third friend offers, “What’s best is low level formatting, if you camera offers it.” For a lot of people starting out in digital photography, all these bits of advice can seem both conflicting and confusing.  What is low level and why is it better?  What happens if I just delete?  And will anyone make fun of me if I do the ‘wrong’ thing? First, let me belay the last question.  We are all here to learn and at some point or another everyone faces this question.  So don’t sweat not knowing because this post will help set the record straight on how each method works.  It’s my hope you will then be able to speak intelligently about the different methods and use that knowledge for the greater good of digital photographers everywhere. For the techies out there, I suggest you look away from this next part.  I’m going to over simplify things a bit in order to make sure the basics of data storage are understood.  I’m not going to get into bits and bytes and instead try to make this post accessible for all.  And for the sake of argument, we’ll assume all digital cameras function essentially the same when it comes to card formatting, etc… while admitting different models and brands do things ever so slightly differently.  That’s not really in the scope of this post either. Square One Let’s start with some basics and use an analogy.  Imagine your memory card is a book.  A real simple book with only a table of contents and the pages.  Maybe it’s 50 pages of Table Of Contents (TOC) and another 450 of actual story, so 500 pages in all.  Now then, when you take a picture, essentially what the camera does is write all the information of the picture (all the information from the camera’s sensor) onto a page in the book and then notes that page in the TOC.  Pretty simple.  The camera writes out a page that describes a flower in massive detail and then writes in the TOC that page 342 contains “flower, shot on March 12th, etc…” You finish shooting for the day.  You’ve downloaded all the information from the card to your computer and are prepared to take more pictures.  Here’s where the different methods come into play

The Different Methods Of Cleaning Memory Cards