The “Seven Saving Graces” of Dealing With Digital Files

We’ve all of heard of the “Seven Deadly Sins” – those seven terrible things that we should never do.  Well, I started thinking about how this could be turned around to create “Seven Saving Graces” – especially as it applies to seven things we should do when it comes to digital files.  You may not agree with all of these – but I’ve found them to be very useful for me.

1. Always shoot as large a file [highest resolution] that you can – Whether it’s in JPG or RAW, go for the quality of the image, not the quantity. It will reduce the number of images on your memory card, but they will be much better images overall.  If you’re going to do serious editing, you want to maximize the available data for editing to wind up with a better final product.
2. Never shoot until the camera tells you that the “Card is Full” – Both your camera and memory cards are like mini-computers.  They work together each time you take an image to move files around on the card to maximize the number of images recorded.  If you have just taken a final image that fills [or exceeds the cards memory]  there is the potential for the memory card to become “confused” and cause the card to corrupt the final image – or possibly the entire card – causing the loss of everything you’ve just shot.  I know this can happen – because it happened to me just last week.  The best thing to do is to stop shooting when you have 4 or 5 images left on the card – then change to a new memory card.
3. Don’t use too big of a memory card – The salesman at the camera store would probably disagree with this one – but remember they’re there to sell you something.  There are two very practical reasons for this.  First, people tend to download images only when their cards are getting full.  With the new high capacity memory cards you can literally have hundreds and hundreds of images on a card - especially if you’re shooting JPG files.  Nothing can be more boring than downloading, looking at, and editing 400 or 500+ images at one time.  The second potential problem related to this is the potential for corruption.  Let’s say, you’ve just been on vacation for a week or two.  You’ve visited several places and have recorded some great shots at every place you’ve visitied.  Now, let’s say that the card corrupts, with every single image of your vacation gone!  The point here is to keep a little “insurance”.  Divide your images over two or more memory cars to ensure that if one card is lost or damaged or corrupted that you have’t lost the whole thing.
4. Download your images at the first opportunity – Believe me, I know from experience that memory cards can get lost or damaged.  Just ask my high-energy golden retreiver.  I left one of my memory cards right on the edge of my workstation in my studio for several days.  I had “better” things to do and didn’t get around to downloading it.  Baylee – my golden retreiver – has a tail that can clean off any surface that’s nearby.  The best I can come up with is that her tail swept the card off the edge of the work station and – unfortunately, then to her mouth.  By the time I got to it – as you can imagine - there was nothing that could be saved.  Had I saved the data to my hard drive when I had the opportunity this wouldn’t have happened.  A second reason to download in a timely manner is that [if you're like me] your memory cards start to stack up.  Just like above, it gets really boring to be dealing wifh hundreds of images to edit and catalogue.
5. When downloading images from your camera, memory card, or other storage device – copy – don’t move them – Remember, your camera, memory card and other storage devices are little mini-computers themselves.  All of the images were stored using certain algorithms in software particular to that device.  There is less chance of corrupting these devices – and your files – if you copy them in lieu of moving them which will, in effect, erase them from the original device.
6. When finished downloading, don’t let the computer do the work of erasing your memory card – put the memory card back in the camera and let the camera do the work – Just like the admonition “copy – don’t move” above you should use the same softward that created the files to delete them.  Doing otherwise has the small – but very real potential – to corrupt the original file or device.  This “saving grace” is tied to the last one below.
7. When you clean off your memory cards – don’t erase – format the card – Every digital images is made up of millions of individual pixels – each with a little bit of information about that particular image.  Erasing – while doing an OK job of removing the image – has the potential to leave stray pixels on the memory card.  They in turn have the potential of creating corruption problems when you re-record new images on the card.  To eliminate this problem – format the card every time you’re done downloading – don’t just erase the images.  This will give you an absolutely clean memory card, with no potential for corruption due to random, “leftover” pixels.

Unlike the “Seven Deadly Sins”, these “Seven Saving Graces” have nothing to do with saving your soul – but I can guarantee you they may well “save your bacon” some day.  Best – Bill

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