Apple was killing it with iPhoto/Photos for this use case until a few years ago. Put in a memory card and Photos would import new photos, offer to delete after import, and ignore photos still on the card. Photo Stream made it possible to have a minimal set of photos in the cloud to have on other devices, which could be configured to sync various albums.

Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.

> Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.

I don’t understand that. If you use iCloud, the cloud is primary storage, and your disk caches recently accessed cloud data.

So, just keep everything in a single library, and if your disk fills up iCloud will remove pictures you haven’t accessed recently from your disk.

Some people don’t want to see all their bad shots when scrolling through their library, but they do want to keep them.

> because photos don't require highest speed cards

That hypothesis is certainly getting tested these days in specific niches. With high megapixel sensors, pre-capture, and cameras capable of pushing between 30fps and 120fps worth of compressed raws or high quality JPEGs, you can obliterate your camera's write buffer and CFExpress write bandwidth. You can make many bad photos of an animal, bird, or athlete with extreme ease -- and hopefully find that one winner in the haystack.

I would say the line between movies and photos is getting blurred, but it's unlikely you're using a shutter speed that allows for motion blur with these bursts of photos!

> high megapixel sensors, pre-capture, and cameras capable of pushing between 30fps and 120fps worth of compressed raws or high quality JPEGs

Surely those are buffered in the RAM first, then flushed to the card. When the buffer is full, cameras either stop recording or have to flush continuously, which reduces the burst rate.

Yes, that's correct. Buffer sizes are also all over the place, so if you want to shoot continuously, you need to pick carefully. Check https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1856860/0 for a thorough analysis starting with the Sony A9iii (which can fill the buffer incredibly quickly with its premier feature, the 120fps 14-bit raw output global shutter). Deeper in the thread compares to the Nikon Z9.

>and if you are shooting still (and not video) there's really no good reason to ever delete an image off an SD card

There are tons of good reasons.

When downloading images off the card, software has to read all the files on it - which can take a very long time if the card is full of photos you've already processed in a previous session.

Then there's that you shouldn't be keeping most of the shots you take. Unless you're a still life artiste, most people (including professionals) take multiple pictures to account for blinking, moving objects, slightly different angles, etc. You should keep the best shots and delete the rest - storage is cheap but having to go back through all the garbage to find the good shots in the future is pointless.

Modern cameras have large sensors that produce large files. It's wasteful to keep buying more and more SSD cards. Just build a NAS or pay for cloud storage.

Nothing worse than getting footage ingest underway and discovering the card has all kinds of stuff on it already that you now need to audit

Library software typically avoids that.

It doesn't avoid the delays. I have incredibly fast CFx cards, an incredibly fast card reader, and an incredibly fast CPU in my desktop, but the simple reality is that reading tens (or hundreds) of gigabytes over USB takes a long time, and analyzing those files to determine if they're already in my large photo library takes a lot of resources too. Minutes, not milliseconds.

A RAW file from a Nikon Z8 is generally 50-70MB. If I left 300 photos on the card before going out for a shoot, that's tens of gigabytes of data to transfer and analyze before the software can get to the images I'm actually interested in. If it's hundreds of gigabytes the problem is even worse.

Then we can go the other direction. Popping a partially full card in my camera with media that I can’t sort through at a glance/quickly. Library software isn’t going to help you there.

Best practice is to dump, back up, and format. If you’re doing photos and you’re not shooting several gigs per shot hundreds of times then sure you can hold onto those SD cards, but then you need to take them out of rotation.

Ultimately boils down to the kind of user we are talking about, which is incredibly varied

Yeah, after working through this blog post, I ordered 6 more cards, so I can have a queue and not delete footage until project completion!

> My advice is to have "some fair number" of SD cards and when you are done with the card in the camera, put it aside and install another card that hasn't been used in aw

Yeah, a kind of rotating workflow seems necessary when you doing professional camera stuff.

Of course, something like this can always happen; however, it's just as likely that an SD card will fail at some point.

The camera should record redundantly, and many semi-pro cameras already do this if you want them to. Then you can leave the second card untouched and have a spare one and rotate only the spares.

My advice is to run a script that automatically copies the files to the right place rather than hope you have the right window open at the time.

> photos don't require highest speed cards

I photograph birds in flight at 25 or 50 FPS.

Even if I didn't do something that demands fast cards and fills them up quickly, I don't see much reason to keep photos on SD cards rather than my laptop's SSD with an external HDD as backup. I import and cull the photos, run a backup, and reformat the cards.

Except unpowered SD cards (and SSDs for that matter) don't claim to hold data for more than a couple of years.

I'm a big believer in thinking you have backups being worse than knowing you don't, so anything that encourages people to believe $(flash memory) is suitable as long-term cold storage is actually, really bad.

I agree there's no need to copy & wipe cards immediately, but treating them as "film" is inherently flawed and setting yourself up for failure. The amount of people that turn up in data recovery forums unable to access old, important, "backed up" (memory card/ssd on a shelf) photos is depressingly high.