Why wont my pictures delete off my memory card?

Try deleting your pictures primarily through your camera instead of your Mac.
You may also need to download the latest
update for your camera brand and Mac
OSX.

I use a card reader so I dont plug my camera in directly to my computer

formatting really isnt the worst…

If you use iPhoto, there’s an option to delete the originals off the csamera when importing. If you are doing a drag-n-drop to the hard drive, my guess would be that you need to empty the Trash before ejecting the camera/memory card.

Same goes for Flash drives, external hard drives, etc. The Trash is really just a folder whose contents are allowed to be overwritten, they aren’t deleted until you manually empty the Trash (or the Mac overwrites them I suppose).

I would guess that you are throwing away your pictures, but not emptying the trash can before disconnecting?

Just try emptying the trash before you disconnect the card and see if that fixed your problem.

N.b., that things in the trash will not be ever overwritten until you delete them for real. Sort of like a real trash can. It’s not really gone until you put the garbage out.

excellent use of metaphor, bpeoples.

Hello flutter friends,

I too face this same problem. I’ve been deleting pictures off my flash drive using my Mac (ibook G4) and sadly, when loading the camera, it turns out the pictures aren’t actually deleting. I know I should have deleted them using the camera, not the computer, but it’s a little late for that at this stage. I’ve tried loading the card on to my computer and emptying trash, but there’s nothing to empty. I used to use iPhoto but it was such an awful program that I stopped, and have been manually drag and dropping from card to hard drive for a while now.

Any ideas?

Thanks so much!

on your Mac OSX open application called DISK UTILITY it gives you full control erase reformat whatever. you can do it with DISK UTILITY. comes with all macs just make sure you select the right drive before erasing