Digital picture frame file systems - FAT or NTFS on SD card

Wow, it took me a lot longer to load some pictures on some digital photo frames than it should have.  We have two digital photo frames - one that someone gave us and one that we just bought.  The one someone gave us is a few (??) years old.  It had a 2 GB SD card in it with 172 photos.  I just wanted to add 100 photos and be done.  No problem!

Turns out I could only add about 20 more before I got an error: "The root of drive F:\ is formatted with FAT file system and can only store a limited number of items, store in a sub-folder or reformat the drive using NTFS file system ".  After doing some reading online, only the oldest FAT format has this limitation, but FAT32 does not.  And since I wasn't positive that the frame supported NTFS.  I decided to format the SD card as FAT32 (after backing up all the files of course).

I formatted the SD card as FAT32, was able to add back all 272 files, and view them all on the older frame.  That was great, but I wanted to see how much better they would look on the new frame.  So I took the SD card out of the old frame and put it in the new frame.  Hmmmm..... the new frame is not recognizing the SD card. Well, since the frame is new and FAT is an old file system format, I figured maybe I need to format the card as NTFS for the new frame.

Now I formatted the SD card as NTFS and added back all 272 pictures a second time.  Put it back in the new frame....still not recognized.  I pressed every button on the thing trying to get it to read from the SD card instead of internal memory.  No luck.  It was reading pics from internal memory just fine though.  So I figure at least I can copy them to internal memory and it will work.

I copy all 272 files (third time) to the internal memory of the frame.  Now the new frame is showing the photos and looks great.  My wife tells me that someone else she knew had the same problem with an older memory card.  Sounds like the new frames don't recognize old SD cards, no matter what their file system is.

Since the new frame can't use the SD card, I figure I might as well put the card back with the old frame.  Oh, guess what?  Now the SD card is formatted as NTFS and the old frame doesn't recognize it.  So I reformat the SD card (third formatting) back to FAT32 and copy the 272 files (fourth copying) back to the card, put it into the old frame, and now we have two frames showing the same 272 pictures.   Hooray!