How Many Pictures a 128gb SD Card CAN Hold (RAW + JPEG)

Wondering how many pictures can a 128GB SD Card hold? You’ve landed at the right place.

In this post, you’ll learn about how many photos (RAW or JPEG) you can store in your 128GB memory card. Note that there are various factors that affect the photo size, which in turn makes a lot of difference in how many pictures your memory card can hold.

Factors Affecting Photo Size

There are a number of factors that will affect the size of each image. These factors include:

• Image Resolution: This is the most significant factor that affects photo size. the higher the image resolution of your camera, the greater your photo size will be.
• Image Compression: Shooting in JPEG (compressed) significantly reduces the image size when compared to uncompressed image formats (RAW).
• Video files: If you have a camera, it’s obvious that you would shoot both photos and videos. So, you must take into account the video size as it can add up quickly and reduce available space for photos on the SD card.
• Other files: Many cameras create additional files other than the video and image files. For example, GoPro cameras create LRV and THM files that will also use space on your SD card.

Therefore, coming up with an absolute number of photos that your SD card can hold is not as simple as it seems. All the above-mentioned factors can hugely affect the image size and the available capacity on the card.

JPEG & RAW Files

To determine how many pictures a 128GB card can hold, the first thing you need to consider is the file type – whether it’s RAW or JPEG.

JPEG

JPEG files are hugely popular and are easy to open on any device. A 128GB SD card can hold about 35,500 JPEG pictures. However, this number can vary depending on the picture quality. If your camera has more megapixels, it would translate into more space for each picture. So, while a 12MP camera can fill 128GB with about 35,500 photos, a 24MP camera will only be able to fit 2,600 photos in the same space.

Have a look at the below table to learn how the camera resolution affects the number of JPEG pictures you can store per GB:

RAW

Coming to RAW files – these files are brand-specific. It means that you can view these files on your camera but not on a different device. Typically, they are much larger than JPEG files, which is why you won’t be able to store as many pictures in a 128GB SD card. On average, an uncompressed RAW file is about 30 MB in size. So, a 128GB  SD card can store about 4,300 RAW pictures.

Pro Tip: Move RAW files from your SD card to a computer or external hard drive to free up space.

GoPro Cameras – How Many Photos Can My 128GB Card Hold?

In this section, I’ll let you know how many photos (JPEG) can you realistically store on your 128GB microSD card when you use it in different GoPro models.

GoPro Hero 8 Black, Hero 7 Black & Hero 6 Black

All these cameras use the most common image resolution for GoPros – 12MP. So, the image size of these cameras is approximately 3.6MB. This translates into roughly 35,556 images that you can store on a 128GB SD card.

GoPro Max