“How many cards should I pack?” has a real answer once you know your camera’s file sizes, this works it out for photos and video both.
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Photo & Video Storage Calculator
How many shots fit on a card, or how many minutes of footage, plus how many cards to bring on a trip.
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Why this is an estimate, not a guarantee
Real file sizes depend on scene complexity, a detailed forest shot compresses far less than a plain sky, plus each camera brand's own RAW compression efficiency, which varies more than people expect. The figures here use realistic middle-of-the-road estimates (JPEG fine ≈ 0.4 MB per megapixel, compressed RAW ≈ 1.3 MB per megapixel, uncompressed RAW ≈ 1.8 MB per megapixel) and assume a card's usable capacity is about 93% of its advertised size once formatted, since cards are marketed in decimal gigabytes but lose some room to the filesystem. Treat the result as a solid planning number and still bring one more card than the math says.
Photo & video storage calculator FAQ
How accurate are these file size estimates?
They're realistic planning numbers, not exact figures. Actual file size depends heavily on scene complexity (a detailed forest shot compresses far less than a plain sky) and each camera brand's own compression efficiency. Use the result to decide how many cards to pack, not as an exact prediction for one specific shoot.
Why is my actual RAW file a different size than the estimate?
RAW compression efficiency varies noticeably between camera brands and even between compressed and lossless-compressed modes on the same camera. If you know your camera's typical file size from experience, trust that over this estimate, and treat this tool as a starting point when you don't have that data yet.
Why isn't a 64GB card actually 64GB of usable space?
Cards are marketed using decimal gigabytes (1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes), and some space is lost to the filesystem once the card is formatted. This calculator assumes about 93% of the advertised size is actually usable, which matches most real-world cards closely enough for planning purposes.
Why does video eat through storage so much faster than photos?
A single photo is one file, a video is effectively thousands of frames written continuously for as long as you're recording, at a sustained bitrate. A few minutes of 4K footage can easily outweigh an entire day of stills, which is why the two modes here are calculated completely separately.
What card size should I bring on a trip?
Use the trip-planning fields, an estimated shots-per-day and number of days, to see exactly how many cards that adds up to, then round up. Carrying two or three smaller cards instead of one large one also limits how much you lose if a single card fails.
Free photo & video storage calculator by ANUPRESS
RAW file size is not a fixed number, even on one camera
Two shots from the identical camera, at the identical resolution, can differ in file size by a wide margin depending on how much detail and noise the scene actually contains, a plain sky compresses far more than a detailed forest. That’s why any storage estimate, this one included, is a planning number built on realistic averages rather than a promise about your next specific shoot.
Video eats a card in minutes what photos take all day to fill
A photo is one file. A video is thousands of frames written continuously for as long as the shutter’s recording, at a sustained bitrate that dwarfs any single still. A few minutes of high-bitrate 4K footage can outweigh an entire day of RAW stills, which is exactly why this splits into two separate modes instead of trying to force one formula to cover both.
The advertised card size and the usable card size aren’t the same
Cards are marketed in decimal gigabytes, and formatting takes a further bite once the card is actually in a camera, so a “64GB” card never holds a true 64,000 megabytes of your files. It’s a small gap, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that turns “should fit” into “didn’t fit” on the last shot of a trip, which is why the estimate here already accounts for it rather than working from the number printed on the card.