Permanently deleting photos from memory?

[Jason R]

I have several smaller size (8mb,32mb) smart media cards that I have considered selling since I don't use them much anymore. I read a story on a msg board about a guy selling a used memory card and later finding some of his landscape photos on the net. Come to find out the person he sold the card to, used a recovery software and got some old delted photos off the card. It was definatly something I'd never thought of before but now I'd like to make sure there are no photos that can be recovered on my cards in case I sell them. In all honestly no one would want any photos of my puppy or my week attempts at wildlife but it's just the principle.

Any ideas on how to permanently delete photos off memory cards? I read in one of the photography magazines that some of these programs can recover images even if the card has been formatted several times.

thanks

[voxmagna]

There are programmes like 'cardwiper' that will do this. But quite honestly, just put your card back in the cam. Point at a boring scene, and keep shooting the biggest files you can to fill the card. Check with cam replay that the new pics have all been stored and the card is full, then erase or format in the cam. Anybody who wants the boring pics (which are still there!) would then be welcome to them!!

I've also got a few smaller cards for an older 1Mpix cam I still use occasionally. I discovered the other day that these older cams often have a max card size limit, and these smaller cards (4-8Mb) are getting rare. So to keep the cam useful I actually bought a couple more of the small cards. I think it's lower capacity NiMhs I need to get rid of at the mo!

[eric s]

This reminds me of an experiment that some graduate students did. They bought 400+ hard disks used off ebay and the like. Then they used recovery software on them and found all kinda of interesting things. Several were from bank machines and they got some very juicy stuff.

Wrote up a nice thesis about it. I sure hope the rules about disposal of bank related hard disks got revised after that (and some people got into trouble.)

You could also just leave the lens cap on and take pictures until the card is filled up. Or just take a picture of a white piece of paper. The only problem is that it might compress so well that it could take awhile.

Eric

[Jason R]

Thanks guys I didn't think about just taking photos to fill up the card then erasing them. Duh! I could just put the camera in raw or a high res and start snapping.

Eric, I remember hearing something about that too. I heard about a guy who bought a used laptop on Ebay and the seller hadn't even cleaned the HD. The buyer found a whole collection of the seller's nudie photos of his wife and all the banking transactions and such.LOL The guy was nice enough to email the seller and tell him that he would reformat the HD and not save any of the contents to protect his (and his wife's.lol) privacy. The seller said thanks he had "forgot to clean the HD". What? How do you forget?lol

Thanks again.

[voxmagna]

Yes I thought about the lens cap, but then I was thinking why not put something on there that's not illegal but spoofy, but if pics ever appeared anywhere - you could have the last laugh. How about something ET?

I'm just thinking of the rocker who crashed his pc and took it into PCworld for fixing and they had him up on a porn charge. Also the soldier who took some nasty pics in for processing and got MP's round his pad and front page news. Better be careful with those media cards then.

[KCan]

The "taking pics" tip may leave a small space not overwrited at the end , where there is not enough space to hold one pic at the curent setting of the camera.
Since I have Norton installed on my PC, I use "WipeInfo" to clean the cards from time to time via the card reader.

[voxmagna]

The "taking pics" tip may leave a small space not overwrited at the end

That's right, so crank the cam down to vga web pic quality after the last TIFF shot - or shoot sound!