How many pictures can a digital camera's memory card hold?

How many pictures can a digital camera's memory card hold?

Mark Comon (Vice President, Paul's Photo, Torrance, CA) gives expert video advice on: What are the differences between photo formats? and more...

It depends on a couple of things. Number one; how many mega pixels is the camera? Number two; how big is the memory card? And number three; what file format do you use? And if you use the best jpeg, which I'll call JPEG Fine, the image size on the memory card is roughly half the mega pixels of your camera. So if I'm in JPEG Fine, which is always where I recommend that you shoot, with an 8 mega pixel camera, that means the pictures are going to be approximately 4 mega bytes on the card. If I shoot with a raw file format, the pictures are roughly two times the mega pixels of the camera. So if I have an 8 mega pixel camera, raw files are sixteen mega bytes. If I shoot with a TIFF, the files are roughly three times the mega pixels, so a TIFF file would be 24 mega bytes on the card. So let's say we have a 1 giga byte card, with our 8 mega pixel camera, so 1 giga byte means 1,000 mega bytes, so with a Fine JPEG, those pictures are 4 mega bytes a piece. On our 1 giga byte card we stored 25. If we use a raw file those pictures are 16 mega bytes a piece. We're going to get about 125 pictures on a 1 giga byte card. If we're shooting TIFFs, they're 24 mega bytes a piece, we're going to get roughly 400 pictures on a 1 giga byte card. That's how you figure out how many pictures you get on your memory card.