Making it Fit on Your 64GB SDCX
64GB is a lot of space. In fact your average laptop has around 100-200GB of storage so what we’re really looking with a 64GB SDCX at is a big chunk of what you would normally get on one of those but on a device the size of your fingernail. However despite this fact we still tend to find ways to fill that space up – and it’s almost as though the more space we have the more space we need. It’s just like money in that sense – the more you have the more you spend and people tend to say for this reason that we ‘live within our means’.
Thus, even though it’s such a big card, we often find ourselves disappointed that we can’t fit that extra song on it, or that extra film for our holiday. Or can we? Actually in many cases there are ways to make things fit that we aren’t aware of or don’t think of. Here we will look at how this can work.
For software for instance you will usually copy the whole directory across. If you have a game called ‘Ultimate Fun Monkey Game’ then you’ll probably copy over ‘UltimateFunMonkey’ the folder as it is. This will then copy all the sub-directories and folders that that game needs to run. The question is though – does it in fact need them? In many cases these folders will include things that you actually don’t need to run the game and that might include instruction manuals, screen captures, images, adverts for other games or even demos for whole other games. You have to be careful here to copy across everything the game needs to run but if you use your intuition then the folder titles can let you know when something is unnecessary such as ‘Demos’ or ‘Extras’.
When it comes to individual files which we more often want to copy onto our 64GB SDCX such as videos and music, then sadly we often don’t have this luxury. However in this case we do have the option to compress the files and thereby make them smaller. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, compressing a file or folder means encrypting it in such a way that it makes the file smaller. For instance then if you had a picture then the file would consist of lots symbols that communicate to the file-viewing software the coordinates and colors of the individual pixels. When you compress this folder that information is condensed in a form of abbreviated code so that single digits refer to whole strings of previous symbols. This way your devices can then decode that encryption to create the image, but the file will consist of less information and so be smaller. Why don’t we always encrypt files this way? Well it makes them slower as the computer has to work harder to understand them, and many devices such as cameras can’t view them until you decrompress them again.
Finally you can consider actually changing the file to make it smaller. For instance if you have a picture in paint then you can crop it to be half the width and height, or you can save it as a gif file with less color information.
A 64GB SDCX is a big card, but it can still be useful to know how to make more space. Follow the links to get started with your own, or a 32GB Micro SDHC for smaller devices.
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