UKC

Hi folks,
Hope you've all had a good Saturday so far. Village Christmas carols and a visit from Santa was our daughters highlight for the day.

We seem to have an SD card problem. We have 3 of them, all 16GB, 2 are bog standard and the other is a SDHC.

Anyway, I took all the pictures from them, stuck them on the Mac then tried them all in the camera. They are all now empty but the camera (Nikon D5000) tells me that all the cards are full.

Can anyone help? Have googled and it says it is a format thing or it says that I need to delete the card whilst in the mac but neither of these seems to have worked although I'm a big when it comes to my camera so could I have not formatted it properly or are they buggered?

Thanks in advance, Den

In reply to Denni:

Had you tried formatting them with the camera itself? It's typically recommended to format SD cards with the camera itself as operating systems (Windows, Mac OS) can leave their own gumph on the card during the formatting process with can be (but not usually) problematic.

In reply to richyfenn:

Thanks mate, will try that now...

In reply to Denni:

It's to do with the way Mac deletes the photos… It moves them to a hidden trash folder on the SD card, Linux can do something similar too.

To properly remove them you need to empty trash, right on the trash can on the side bar and select empty trash. Obviously make sure the SD card is still plugged into the computer.

Not sure if this will work once the SD card has been removed and reinserted… Or just reformat the card

In reply to Denni:

Some programs that are used to transfer files from card to computer have an option to delete the files from the card after transfer. Mine has a tick box that I uncheck to make sure this doesn't happen. I use several cards and rotate their use so when I put them back in to re-use they still have the transferred files on them. I routinely delete all these files and format the card. So far not had any problems though I once forgot to do this and mixed Canon format files with Nikon which caused a few problems.

In reply to Denni: I suspect that CharlieW has the correct answer. The easy way to check is to pop the card back in to the Mac and then open the Trash from the Dock. If the photos you'd thought you'd deleted are there, all you need to do is to right click the Trash icon and select "Empty Trash", and they'll be permanently removed from the SD card.

OS X treats an SD card like any other data storage device. It creates a hidden Trash folder (called .Trashes) in the root of the SD card and any file that you drag to the Trash icon on the Dock gets moved to that hidden folder. To get rid of the file completely from the SD card you have to empty the Trash.

Windows behaves differently with removable storage devices compared to OS X. In Windows, if you drag a file on an SD card to the Recycle Bin, or select it and click delete in the Explorer toolbar, you get a dialogue box asking if you want to delete the file. If you answer yes then the file is deleted immediately.

Note: Any 16GB SD card must be SDHC: the original SD standard only went up to 2GB (although some 4GB devices were produced). SDHC is pretty much the expected norm these days, so manufacturers - particularly those at the lower-cost end of the market - often don't bother to mark their cards as SDHC.