Suggestions for organising SD cards?

[Colin McDonald]

I find that I now have a quite a collection of SD/miniSD/microSD cards used for audio and some video acquisition as well as CP storage, and am finding it increasingly difficult to keep on top of what is used for which.

Particular problems seem to me to be:

(1) that they are physically difficult to label (particularly the mini and micro versions)
(2) that they are small enough to be easily misplaced
(3) the various combinations of card and adaptor size do not seem to lend themselves to a standard storage format.

I think I've just about managed so far partly because of the various capacities and manufacturers involved but I could really do with sorting this out. I had a few near misses with mixing up an identical card formatted for a camera with one formatted for a Zoom H2 or H4n (which themselves are not interchangeable).

At first when all cards were the standard SD size it was easier, but when the larger capacities started appearing in mini and micro form it started to get a bit chaotic.

Are there commercially available solutions which will help identify and safely store the cards and also cope with all the variables? What does everyone else do?

[Paul Mailath]

it's a pain - they're just too small for an old fella like me.

I use a small label printer to print letters for each card and stick them on so I have 8a,8b,8c etc up to 64a,64b etc

I line them up on the desk and it's easy to see if one is missing (not so easy to find it) when I dump footage I rename the files using the card ID as a prefix - 16b-003, 16b-004 (I know that uspets some NLE's but not Edius)

the micro SD's are a bigger pain - I leave them in the zoom or tascam and simply get the data, they're too small to fiddle with.

it works for me - sort of

[David W. Jones]

I carry mine in something like this..... Pelican 0915 Memory Card Case 0910-015-110 B&H Photo Video

[Chris Medico]

I uniquely number each card on the back with a paint pen. Just a simple number. With less info written I can write it big for my aging eyes.

I keep a small flip notebook with me to manage where the cards are and what is shot on each card. I start a new page for each shoot and go ahead and write a row of numbers starting with the first card I plan to use. As soon as a card comes out of a camera I set the write tab (on the SD cards) to "protect" and put it in the card wallet. I make an entry to the notebook to indicate it has been stored. If there is something of note to look at later I write that next to that cards entry.

I learned this method from my first broadcast job. The TV station had a wall of tapes each with a simple and easy to read number. The tape log had the tape number and any notes on what was on it. Retrieving the tapes were easy since they were kept in numerical order.

This may sound like overkill but I do the same thing with memory cards. It helps to minimize errors when handling a bunch of small identical objects. It frees me to pay attention to other things on my shoot and less on media management.