How to Permanently Delete Pictures & Files From Memory Cards

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Chris Bryce from superservice.com. We're going to talk about how to permanently delete pictures and files from memory cards. Now there's several different types of memory cards available out there; from MMC Card, which is Multi Media Cards to SD Cards, Micro SD Cards, Flash Cards, Flash Drives, Stand Drives, several different styles of memory cards out there. We're going to look at the Flash Drive style of memory card. Now on the other memory cards that you may have, several of todays computers come with readers that will allow you to read those cards directly from the computer. If not, you can pick up a USB card reader, very inexpensively between ten to twenty dollars, they'll be able to read those different cards. Now most computers, if not all computers today, have at least one USB port on, so you can get that USB reader and read several types of cards. For this particular instance, we're going to use a USB Flash drive. You simply connect the USB Flash drive to the USB port and allow the computer to pop up with a dialog box. In that dialog box will be an option to view those pictures or to open the pictures or files, using Windows Explorer. We're going to go ahead and choose the open pictures and files using Windows Explorer. We'll select okay, and the pictures and files will come up in the dialog box that shows on the left hand side, a list of the removable drives that are on your computer. If you select the removable drive, that in this particular instance is E drive, we'll right click on the E drive, the removable disk drive, which is our Flash drive and go down and select the format from the menu that comes up. Once you select format, a wizard will walk you through the rest of erasing those files. There's a quick format which will allow you to quickly erase the files and allow you to use that memory card again for taking more pictures or adding more files. There's also a full format, which will completely and permanently take all of those files off of that drive. So the full format maybe what you want to do to permanently delete those files. You can go in and select the full format, this will take anywhere from a few minutes to several minutes, depending on the size of your drive or memory card. Once you select the format, it will walk you through finish up formatting and everything will be ready to add new files in the future. That's how you permanently delete pictures and files from your memory cards."