FAT!

I decided that I would add a new set of pictures to cycle through my digital photo frame. I've taken quite a few over the last year, all processed and edited through Aperture. I flagged the very best and then exported to JPEGs that fit into a 1024 x 768 pixel space (the native resolution of the photo frame).

For some reason, though, I couldn't add any more files when I tried to add them on my mac. I got a somewhat cryptic error, telling me that there wasn't any space left on the 2 GB card. There were only about 307 files totaling 55 MB on the 2 GB card. It wasn't adding up - I figured it was a PC formatted card and my Mac wasn't playing nice with it. I had a flash of brilliance - I just needed to copy the files from Andrew's desktop computer onto the 2 GB card.

I went to Andrew's computer (running Windows 7) and tried to copy files over. I got a slightly different error message on Windows and chased it down. I found the right advice here. Turns out that my 2 GB card was formatted at FAT16. Seriously? How does a device made in 2010 get formatted with a technology hailing from 1984?

Seriously, it was formatted as FAT16, like the file format that shipped with MS-DOS. That format limits the number of files in a directory to 512. The root directory is even more limiting. After a quick reformat to the fantastically current technology of 1995 that is FAT32, the pictures copied over fine.