SD Card Error

When you have the latest updated firmware installed on your camera, you may occasionally see an icon appear on your photos that shows an SD card with a line through it. This is part of a new feature added in the firmware of the camera, allows the cameras to send photos without writing them to an SD card.

While this this feature does allow the camera to send photos without an SD card installed, it is NOT Recommended to deploy your camera in the field without an SD card, since it will limit several functions of the camera without having an SD card installed.

This article will explain this icon and all the details surrounding the SD card error and what it means for you.

SD Error Icon on Photos

When you notice an SD card icon on the bottom left of a thumbnail or at the bottom left of the screen when viewing a photo, that means that the photo was taken without the original photo being written to the SD card.

On limitation you may notice when checking these photos is that none of these photos will have the option for requesting an HD photo or a Video (if the camera is on P+V mode).
That is because there is no original HD photo or Video recorded on the SD to be sent by the camera.

Note: If the camera has an SD card error currently, then it will likely not be able to read and upload any HD photo or Video from previous photos, even if the HD and Video request icons are present. The icons are present still to give the option of requesting it still but the upload of those HD photos or Videos are not guaranteed.

SD Error on Status Report

For these cameras that have SD card errors, you can check the Status Report for the camera and see there what the state of the SD card is.

On the below example screenshot, you can see that the state says “Error Detected” for the SD card state, and also shows that 62MB are being reported for the card size.

This 62MB (sometimes 63MB) is the default size that the camera will report if there is no SD card inserted. If the camera is still able to read the SD card size, then the size will still be reported, but the error will be caused by something else to do with the SD card.

SD Card errors can be caused by:

• SD card not being plugged in
• SD card is plugged in but cannot be read by the camera
• SD card cannot be written to due to some write error
• SD card is locked
• SD card is larger than the camera supports (Over 32GB for GoCams, over 128GB for GoLive).

If the camera is still able to read the SD card and the error is being caused by something like a read/write problem with the SD card’s file system, then a Format command could possible fix the issue, and the SD card icon will disappear from the photos if the issue is fixed successfully.