Things to do before you sell your digital camera

Many people sell their old digital camera when they buy a new one. Those cameras are often sold on sites like eBay and it is a wise move to make sure that all photos stored on internal memory and on external storage cards are not accessible anymore. This may not be a big problem if you simply took some pictures of landscapes all the time but it soon becomes one if you took personal and private pictures using that camera.

While you can delete photos that you have taken with your camera, it does not necessarily mean that they are indeed gone. Depending on how the camera's internal software deletes them, they may very well be still stored in storage even though the camera reports that they are gone.

File recovery software may be used then to restore the photos so that the third party that bought the camera can access the photos that you have taken with it again.

The major problem with internal space is that it is not possible to access it directly by means of connecting your digital camera to the computer. The only save way to delete those files is to overwrite them with random pictures. Some cameras have a delete function as well which can be used to delete the pictures in the internal memory but I would still suggest to take random pictures to overwrite the space at least once.

External memory cards on the other hand are easier to handle but also easier to recover. If you simply delete the pictures anyone with a recovery program will be able to recover all pictures on that card. There is however an easy way to be on the safe side. Simply use the software Eraser on the Flash card to delete all information on it and make it impossible by normal means to recover photos that were stored on the device previously.

Click on new task in Eraser, select Files or folders and choose the smartcard or digital camera from the list of devices that are currently connected to your computer.

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