You would have aware that deleted photos aren't really deleted; they can be recovered using some software like our Easy Photo Recovery.  Thus, when someone (e.g. Print & Develop shops, friends who lend/borrow the memory card, family members, etc) gains access to your memory card, there is a risk that your 'deleted photos' can be viewed and recovered by them. In most of the cameras, your photos can be recovered even you have formatted your memory card.

To avoid 'deleted photos' being recovered by commonly available software, you need a software to completely remove the photos rather than the usual 'delete'.

For solid state memory, one pass should be sufficient.  In fact, memory card has limited life, typically 10,000 to 100,000 write cycle endurance. Shredding a memory card too many times will reduce its usable life.  In addition, nowadays most of the memory cards support 'wear leveling' (see below).  As wear leveling may assign physical new card space to replace the original location, erasing the same logical location more than once may not improve security.

Normally, reading the memory card will not reduce the usable life of memory card.

Wear leveling is a mechanism to write same logical sector to different physical sectors.  In the file system of a memory card, some locations (e.g. the file allocation table) are updated frequently.  As memory card has limited number of write/erase cycles, wear leveling will in general extend the lifetime of a memory card by write/erase evenly in the card storage and/or spare blocks.

Different memory card manufacturers have different wear leveling mechanism.  Further information can be found at the website of the manufacturers, for example, http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/File/OEM/WhitePapersAndBrochures/RS-MMC/WPaperWearLevelv1.0.pdf

Below is quoted from Toshiba website http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2004/file_04_211.jsp:

"For example, if a 256MB MLC NAND Flash-based card can typically store 250 pictures from a 4-megapixel camera, its 10,000 write/erase cycles, combined with wear-leveling algorithms in the controller, will enable the user to store and/or view approximately 2.5 million pictures within the expected useful life of the card. This number is so far beyond the average number of photos taken by the typical user that the difference in endurance between MLC NAND and SLC NAND is not a significant factor for this application. For a more general application such as a USB drive, the 10,000 write/erase cycles would enable the user to completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years, well beyond the life of the hardware ."

As a rule of thumb, avoid formatting the card in PC; format it in the digital device (e.g. digital camera). It is because some PC file system (e.g. FAT32, NTFS) and the cluster size may not be supported by the device.  In some cases, the worst scenario will be the camera behaves normally after a picture is shot, but actually the picture is not saved to the memory card.

First format your card using your digital device.  Then clean up all unused space using Easy Photo Shredder.

Easy Photo Shredder will lock media when the clean up is in progress to avoid more than one program updating the memory card.

Yes, if you are a registered user of Easy Photo Shredder.

Simply download the evaluation copy of Easy Photo Recovery from our website, and install it.

Easy Photo Recovery will automatically perform the registration if you have a valid license key of Easy Photo Shredder.