How Many Pictures Can 32GB SD Card Hold in Your Camera? (With Tips)

If you want to know how many pictures can 32GB SD card hold, you can carefully read this post. Besides, it will also share tips for making use of your SD card.

Posted by @Irene December 17, 2024 Updated By @Irene March 22, 2024

A memory card is your faithful friend as it stores your photos. For photography enthusiasts, finding the most efficient way to store the photos they take is what they want. While a 32GB memory card may be a good choice for photography, you may be concerned that it won't store everything you want to record.

Would you like to know how many photos can 32GB SD card hold? Now, you can keep reading to find what you want.

How many pictures can 32GB SD card hold?

In general, JPEG and RAW are two common image file settings. JPEG is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices and is used in a variety of image file formats JPEG is a compression format. They are a compressed format and fully compliant with the 8-bit boundaries used for web images. The JPEGs are also usually the result of RAW conversion.

The JPEG files size varies depending on the compression amount. On a 20-megapixel digital camera, file sizes range from 5 to 10MB. Under this condition, suppose each JPEG file is 7MB in size, and how many photos will a 32GB SD card hold? Let's see the following table.

Capacity  Pictures can be held with JPEG
32GB 4,700 photos
64GB 9400 photos
128GB 18,800 photos
256GB 37,600 photos

RAW images contain all of the "raw" data from the scene in which they were taken. This means your camera captures the full color and dynamic range of every pixel. They give more room to change exposure values and adjust white balance and color using post-processing software.

As a result, RAW image files are much larger than JPEG files. Most RAW formats are uncompressed. This means that each RAW file (at the same settings) is approximately the same size regardless of the content of the photo. On a 20-megapixel camera, each RAW file is generally about 30MB. If a RAW file takes up 30MB of space, its size on a memory card would be as follows:

Capacity  Pictures can be held with RAW
32GB 1,092 photos
64GB 2,184 photos
128GB 4,368 photos
256GB 8,732 photos

Tips: How to make full use of your SD card to storage pictures?

After getting to know how many pics can a 32GB SD card hold, you may decide to buy it or a different size card. No matter which capacity you choose, it's best to follow these tips to get the most out of your SD card and and better enjoy it.

Tip 1. Format your SD card

Formatting an SD card can have many benefits, especially if you plan to use it in your camera. This ensures that the SD card uses the correct format supported by the camera, such as NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT, thus guaranteeing optimal compatibility between the SD card and the device. In addition, it improves the performance of the SD card as it removes unnecessary files and fragmentation, ensuring optimal read/write speeds and reducing errors.

If you want to format an SD card larger than 32GB to FAT32 (a file system widely used in cameras), you may need to use a professional tool such as AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, otherwise you will encounter problems with failed disk formatting due to its size limitation.

AOMEI software is a free and powerful AOMEI software is a free and powerful toolkit that can help you easily format your SD card or hard disk into NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, Ext2 and Ext3 formats. With it, you can easily format large-capacity SD cards (up to 2TB) to FAT32, and it even supports formatting RAW or write-protected SD cards. You can also use it to convert NTFS to FAT32 when needed.

AOMEI Partition Assistant

The Best Windows Disk Partition Manager and PC Optimizer

Before you do:
Connect your SD card to a functional computer and ensure that it's recognized.
Formatting will delete all data on the SD card partition, so be sure to back up your important data beforehand.

Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant, locate the partition on your SD card that requires formatting, right-click it, and select "Format Partition”.

Step 2. In the dialog box, choose the file system of the SD card that compatible with your camera, such as formatting to FAT32 or exFAT. (Here, select exFAT as an example.)

Step 3. Confirm the pending operations. Afterward, click “Apply” > "Proceed” to start the formatting process.

Notes:
In Step 2, you can change a partition label to this partition, making it easy to distinguish from others if there are multiple partitions.
Cluster size denotes the smallest space on the disk used to store a file. In step 2, you can adjust the cluster size of your partition according to your preferences.
In addition to formatting SD cards, AOMEI Partition Assistant can also format SSDs, USB flash drives, and other similar external hard drive devices.

Tip 2. Recover lost files on the SD card

What if you formatted your old SD card but didn’t back up any of your lost precious photos? Or what if you suffer from an unexpected accident that causes data loss? It is time to upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It has powerful data recovery functions that can help you recover data lost in various situations such as formatting, corruption, accidental deletion, virus attacks, etc. In addition to recovering pictures, videos, or other common files on SD cards, it can even support recovering emails, documents, and over 200 file types from USB, HDD, SSD, and more.

Note: If you are a Windows Server 2008 (R2), 2012 (R2), 2016, 2019, 2022 and SBS 2003, 2008, 2011 user, please turn to the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server version for the best compatible environment.

Step 1. Launch AOMEI Partition Assisant Professional. Then select Recover > Recover Data in turn in the main interface.

Step 2. Click the drive where the deleted data is stored. Select the Start Scan to continue.

Step 3. Once the scan is finished, all deleted files will be displayed. Choose the target file you need to recover by clicking the Recover button.

Step 4. In this step, please select a path to save the recovered SD card files.

Step 5. When the recovery is over, click OK to exit it.

Conclusion

Today, we share how many pictures can 32GB SD card hold with tips to help you better use the SD card. With AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can not only make full of the SD card, but also effectively manage your Windows computer. You can use it to extend the drive space, upgrade SSD or HDD, or fix blue/black screen issues at home by yourself.