How many digital photos can a memory card hold?

How many digital photos can a memory card hold?

Mark Comon (Vice President, Paul's Photo, Torrance, CA) gives expert video advice on: How does my digital camera turn my picture into a file?; How do various types of memory cards differ?; How much memory do I need for my digital camera? and more...

Well, it depends on the quality of your digital pictures. Remember we talked earlier to shoot the camera at the highest megapixel and find JPEG? When you go to buy a camera at a big box or club store, it's going to say on the sign 'thousands of pictures on your memory card!' Woah, dude! Thousands of pictures! Well, that's at low quality. How many pictures your memory card can take depends on the quality. If you set the camera to the higest megapixels and the highest picture quality, remember that the picture size on the memory card is going to be roughly half the megapixels on the camera. So if I have a ten megapixel camera, the pictures are going to be five megabytes apiece on the memory card. So how many pictures will my memory card hold? You divide the number of megabytes into the total megabytes of the card. So if I have a five hundred and twelve megabyte card and my pictures are five megabytes each, I can get roughly a hundred pictures on the memory card. Now, I could also set that camera to get a thousand pictures on the memory card. But they're much lower quality pictures. You want to take the best quality pictures you can.