Working with compact flash cards

[email68]

I'm new to mac and have a problem dealing with the way os x uses flash card memory.

I have a digital audio recorder that records to flash. When I pull the audio files off the card and then delete them, it goes to a hidden ./trash folder on the card and eats up the memory.

Same thing happens with photos from my cameras flash card. Is there anyway to keep this from happening? Or a way to remove the ./trash off the flash card w/o emptying the trash on the dock?

A second issue I came across is we recently got a photo frame that takes the flash cards. I exported about 80 photos from iPhoto to the card. When I put the card in the photo frame only the first 10 played even though they showed in Finder. I ended up having to delete them all and copy them on a windows machine for it to work properly .

Any ideas on this stuff?

Thanks

 

[mkrishnan]

Let's start with the CF card... can you please explain how you are pulling images and movies off the card? If possible, say if you are doing one of the following or something different:

1. Using iPhoto and iMovie to transfer the images/movies (and selecting the "delete originals" option where appropriate)

2. Using the Image Capture utility to transfer the images/movies and again, telling it to delete the originals

3. Your camera mounts as a drive on the desktop when you plug it in, and you drag files over

4. You remove the flash card from the camera, put it in a flash card reader that plugs in via USB or something like that, and then it mounts on the desktop.

If you are doing 1-3, what camera do you actually have, first of all? For 1-2 (this is what I do), I've never heard of this happening with major makes of cameras. If you do 3-4, you may need to empty the trash before you eject the card. Usually, from what I understand, the device is supposed to tell the OS that it is a removable device, and this will prevent OS X from making a trash folder. In that case, you get a special warning from OS X that things you trash will be permanently deleted. (For instance, you don't typically have this problem on USB flash memory drives, as far as I know.) But if the device fails to properly inform that it is a "removable device," then OS X treats it like any other drive and allows there to be a trash folder.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Rule:
Never work directly on a flash card.
Copy the files onto the Mac, and then use the camera or audio device to reformat the card.

 

[email68]

Actually both mount to the desktop as drives and I drag the files out.

On the marantz digital recorder you activate a button and it connects to the mac usb as a drive.

In the case of the camera I pull the card out and plug into a flash usb reader.

Re formating the cards seems like an unnecessary extra step. I guess emptying the trash would work but it would be nice if the OS would realize its a removable disc. Anyway to teach the os that is removable, not to keep a ./trash on it?

Any idea about the photo frame not able to read the files written by the mac?

 

[mkrishnan]

Anyway to teach the os that is removable, not to keep a ./trash on it?

Yeah, I can think of one that you may or may not like. Empty the trash on the compactflash card and then change the permissions on the trash folder so you don't have rights to write to it. If that doesn't work, you may also be able to delete the .trash folder and then create a dummy text file called .trash to prevent the folder from being recreated. This works for other things like preventing spotlight indexing.

Any idea about the photo frame not able to read the files written by the mac?

The most obvious thing is that there's something about the way that it expects photo files to be named or stored in folders. Check and see how the file structure looks when you exported it using iPhoto and how it looks when you did it with Windows; if you can figure out what's different, you can probably replicate it using iPhoto.

 

[email68]

Blue Harvest

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