What Does Initializing Mean When Talking About Photography?
When talking about photography, or any activity that uses a digital storage medium, the term ‘initializing’ refers to the process the storage medium goes through to become ready to record new information. Information is stored on a storage medium by assigning values to locations within the available memory; initialization gives each of recordable locations an initial value, usually zero. Initialization is also referred to as ‘formatting’. If you are intending to re-use a memory card which is already full of data, you would remove all data from the memory card by initializing, or formatting it.