There’s a question that the owners of digital cameras ask more than any other: How many digital photos can my digital camera memory card actually hold?

The answer to that question, of course, depends: You’ll have to consider the type of digital camera you own. The resolution of the photos you are taking. And, of course, how much storage your digital camera memory card holds.

This last factor is the easiest for you to control. In most cases, the memory card included with your digital camera won’t hold many photos. Manufacturers generally ship low-memory cards with their cameras. If you want to be able to store many photos at once, you’ll have to purchase a digital camera memory card with more storage space.

Of course, that big question still remains: How many photos can you store at one time on your digital camera’s memory card?

Here’s a general rule of thumb: If you’re operating a 10-megapixel digital camera and using a 2-gigabyte digital camera memory card, you can generally store about 140 photos – give or take – on that memory card.

Unfortunately, there are so many variables when it comes to digital-photo storage, it’s almost impossible to answer this question completely. The amount of photos you can store depends greatly, for instance, on whether you’re saving photos in high or low resolutions. It also depends on whether you’re saving photos as jpegs or tiff files or another format.

You might want to save short videos on your digital camera memory card, too. Videos, of course, take up more storage space than do still images. If you add videos to the mix, it becomes even more difficult to know just how much you can safely store before running out of memory space.

That’s why it’s important to always buy more memory space than you think you’ll need. This will prevent unpleasant surprises at big events. For instance, you don’t want to run out of memory space just before your son comes up to bat for the first time in his Little League career. Make the smart move, and buy a digital camera memory card with a lot of extra memory. You never know when it’ll come in handy.