Film and airport security X-rays have always been a volatile mix.
Because analog film is inherently sensitive to light and radiation, it doesn’t take much exposure inside an X-ray machine to fog or completely wipe a roll of undeveloped film. Understandably, a whole generation of photographers developed a deep-seated paranoia about the security conveyor belt.
In the analog days, many checkpoints would perform hand-checks if requested, though I received my fair share of scowls when handing over a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of 35mm rolls. Manufacturers of the older X-ray machines used to claim that any film rated under ISO 800 wouldn’t be affected. But I experienced enough base-fogging to ignore that advice entirely. I even tried those heavy, lead-lined film pouches, but because airport security agents can’t see through the lead, they simply cranked up the scanner’s radiation intensity, entirely negating the pouch’s protection.
Today, the situation for film shooters is actually worse. Airports globally are replacing traditional X-rays with 3D CT (Computed Tomography) scanners. These machines emit a significantly higher radiation dose and will instantly obliterate undeveloped film of any ISO rating, making hand-checks absolutely mandatory.
Memory cards and airport scanners
The good news is that if you shoot digital, you can leave that paranoia behind. Solid-state memory cards — whether SD, CFexpress, or microSD — are completely immune to both standard airport X-rays and the high-intensity CT scanners.
Despite this, I still see photographers taking their memory cards out of their bags, putting them in their pockets, and carrying them through the passenger scanners. If that ritual gives you peace of mind, go ahead, but there is zero technical reason to do so.
In fact, with millimeter-wave body scanners now the standard, putting a thick stack of memory cards in your pocket is just going to trigger the anomaly alarms, slow down the line, and force a physical pat-down.
The technical reality of NAND flash
The reason memory cards are safe comes down to their architecture. Flash memory doesn’t rely on chemical reactions like analog film, nor does it rely on sensitive magnetic platters like old spinning hard drives. It is solid-state.
Data is stored by trapping electrons inside microscopic floating-gate transistors on a NAND chip. Airport X-rays and CT scanners emit electromagnetic radiation, but the energy levels are nowhere near ionizing enough to physically displace these trapped electrons or spontaneously flip your binary data.1
If you need empirical proof, you don’t have to guess: major card manufacturers engineer their professional cards to meet strict international resilience standards that far exceed the radiation doses of even the newest airport scanners.2)
Logically, it also just makes perfect sense. Think about the sheer volume of business travelers running their laptops, tablets, and smartphones through those exact same conveyor belt scanners millions of times a day. All of those devices use the exact same NAND flash memory architecture as your camera’s memory cards. If airport scanners wiped solid-state storage, the global travel industry would grind to an immediate halt.
So, drop your camera bag on the belt with confidence. Your memory cards (and your SSD drives) will be perfectly fine. It’s one less thing to worry about when you fly.
See also: TSA Security Screening FAQ
Notes & References:
- See
Anju Sharma, Preeth Sivakumar, Andrew Feigel, In Tae Bae, Lawrence P. Lehman,
Joseph Gregor, James Cash and Joseph Kolly, “Effects of x-ray exposure on NOR and NAND flash memories during high-resolution 2D and 3D x-ray inspection,”
IMAPS 2016 – 49th International Symposium on Microelectronics – Pasadena, CA USA – Oct. 10-13, 2016. [PDF] [↩︎] - Major memory card manufacturers officially test and certify their professional SD and microSD cards against the ISO 7816-1 international standard. This compliance requires the card to survive 0.1 Gy (100mGy) of X-ray radiation without data corruption — a dose significantly higher than the exposure from an airport security scanner. Both SanDisk and Lexar explicitly cite this 100mGy / ISO 7816-1 threshold in the official engineering spec sheets for their professional-tier memory cards, as do Kioxia and Kingston. [↩︎]
IM A GENEALOGIST IN CANADA ,I SENT A FLASH AND CAMERA CARD TO MY KIDS IN ARIZONA. BOTH WERE BLANKED, PROGRAMS IN THEM ERASED ALONG WITH DATA. WOULS A DISK BE BETTER?
With the mail, all bets are off when it comes to what scanners they use. They’ve probably been zapped with much stronger scanners than are typically used at airports. And I doubt a hard drive would fair any better and might even be more susceptible to it. A much more reliable (as well as quicker) option would be send the data via the cloud. There’s a bunch of services that can do that, ranging from free to paid plans. One good option I’ve used for a long time reliably is Dropbox; they have a free plan for up to 2GB and paid plans for above that. Google and Microsoft have their own versions, and there are plenty of others.
I had two SD cards 64GB and 16GB totally destroyed by the mm wave full body scanner at the Los Angeles International airport. If only one was damaged I could have explained it away but to have both damaged to the point where they were totally bricked was not a coincidence.
All of your respondents speak about airport scanners. No one has addressed the issue of the xray scanners used by the USPS, and whether they are scanned in bulk, or individually; and whether these scanners are much stronger than the ones used in testing by SanDisk. There is something going on here, and people are not being told the truth. It may be that there IS NO standard for scanners, and they can do virtually anything they want to our property, anytime they want, by calling it “security” and don’t even have to inform us. Personally, I need to mail a card overseas, and don’t want to have to manufacture my own “kryptonite-case”. No one seems to know anything about HOW to overcome these machines. FedEx doesn’t send letters, but a small “package” costs $160. I would certainly appreciate some feedback on how to do this.
pff.. I lost all my photos/app data last year after putting it through one of those scanners. I had a tech try to recover anything and all of his tools failed.
Have had a problem with my Pentax k-m camera, just seems like often when I fly away on holiday I lose the first batch of shots due to ‘memory card error’ after which I re-format the card and then no problems until after the next time I go through airport security. Spent a long time cursing the camera, but now reading this forum, all makes sense.
I just went through security at George Bush Intercontinental in Houston and when I got my Iphone back the display read ‘SIM Card Failure’. It’s never said that. I powered it down and it seems to be working fine now, but if it goes out again I think it would be too much of a coincidence to not blame the x-ray scanners. I’m keeping my fingers crossed because I don’t want to be in a foreign city without anyway to contact family or use my phone.
Just flew back from Las Vegas with 3 SD cards and found one to have been erased. Images were intact prior to leaving Vegas as I reviewed them prior.
I flew from St. Louis to Denver with my Canon 50D; had a 32 gig memory card inside the camera and all was fine. Filled up the memory card and started using a second 32 gig memory card before my return flight home. I was delayed in DIA airport security X-ray for about 15 minutes until a supervisor could check my carry ons by hand, one of which was my camera backpack. The first card was inside that backpack and OK but the second memory card was corrupt upon my attempt to download photos to the PC at home in St. Louis. I called Creve Coeur Camera and took the card and Camera to them. They feel sure it was TSA’s X-ray machines that caused the issue while the memory card was in the camera. They are attempting to retrieve my photos, for a hefty price I might add. If they are not successful, there is a California company that I’m told has a very successful retrieval rate in restoring pics but for a 32 gig memory card, it will cost me $275. Have to decide if pics of Rocky Mountain National Park, my daughter and her dog are worth that kind of money.
Im traveling ti china and Korea for 2 and half months. Im bringing several micro sd cards with my samsung galaxy s7 edge and gopro session. How can I keep my micro sd cards safe threw all the scanning and detectors during my travel? Would I be better off putting all data in portabale hard drive?
As a general rule, having a backup or two is always a good idea. Ideally, they should be in different places in on different media, but that’s not always convenient when traveling. As for airport scanners, this post might help. The short version is that they typically don’t present much of an issue with memory cards. I’ve traveled through a lot of airport security points with a lot of memory cards and have never run into a problem. A bigger concern would be misplacing them or having them (or the camera they’re in) stolen. There are dedicated devices that back up directly from a memory card to a portable hard drive. I’ve reviewed several here. The WD MyPassport Wireless is the simplest and probably best fit if you’re looking to go in that direction.
Hi Guys
I had two micro-SD cards go through Heathrow terminal 2, earlier this week, in my suitcase and they were both wiped clean or the FAT table corrupted so that I couldn’t tell the difference. One in a Garmin LMT-50 navigation unit and the other in a cardboard package. However, the ones in hand luggage were fine. These were both in phones, a Samsung and iPhone 4S. My previous experience has been only with hand luggage and again in this case all have been fine, including the same Garmin LMT-50.
Mike
I’ve put a camera through xray scanners and it corrupted the data and erased some memories of my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary. I was using a cheap card but it was still a popular brand. There are cards that claim protectioion, so I guess not all have it. Nothing you buy is created equal. I just wish I knew that it was going to do that. I probaly would have mailed it to myself upon returning. Or see if they could check it a different way.This time I will be carrying even more precious pictures and video. Ihave not seen my family in 6 years some in 8. They never met the hubby or my kids in person. Plus most of my family are older and I don’t want to have them die and never meet them.
Travelling back from Austin after the GP – my camera sd card was zapped – no data whatsoever – Thanks TSA!
Hi, I had the opposite problem. Two failed 32GB and a 16GB, all Adata. I nuked them on purpose with a homemade vacuum tube based pulsed X-ray jig just for the hell of it, something happened inside the card and the data was accessible again. For about a week to 1.5 months, then they broke. Maybe worth a try on microSDs that are a lot harder to recover with forensics tools.
The failure mode was that they appeared in Winhex but as “all zeros”, after treatment the data was corrupt but for the most part recoverable.
Sometimes the regulator inside the card goes bad and causes problems in some readers, this is also quite common.
My wife went through airport security yesterday and when she went to bed last night she glowed in the dark.
Mine to.
I went through London Heathrow Terminal 2 last night with my Samsung Galaxy phone which has Samsung’s own 64gb micro sd card inside to extend the memory.
Everything was working before it went through the scanner, but after it came out the phone showed the message “SD card is blank or unsupported – Format SD card? – All data on your card will be lost”.
So that is the proof that airport scanners can wipe, or corrupt sd cards.
Heathrow terminal 2 has all new equipment, so maybe these new scanners are too powerful.
The lesson from that experience must be to always back up your data before your sd card goes anywhere near one of these “security scanners”.
Interesting. Thanks for your report. I flew out of Heathrow’s Terminal 2 about a month ago with several CF, SD, and microSD cards and a laptop without any issue.
I went through T3 in Sept, this year, my 2 cameras with SD cards fine, my phone with SD card in had the SD card wiped, :( now have a number of apps from my phone i have no idea what they were as they were standard ios ones but gone for good.
same happened to me… dont remember which airport i was traveling but found my sd card blank after going trough scanner!!!
My wife is an air hostess, and after passing through airport scanners, once her Tablet (Samsung) and her Cell Phone (Samsung)’s SD Cards (both Kingston) were zapped.
I work in a Courthouse and my bag is goes through x-ray every day. So far I have lost the data on two SD cards.
It is not proof at all, at least not the sense of demonstrating that airport scanners affect memory cards. Once incident proves nothing. The card could have failed for any of many different reasons. At best it SUGGESTS that scanners might have an effect, but to PROVE it you would have to make a properly controlled experiment.
All the other instances that people have added are anecdotal and they prove nothing either.
Thanks for the article! Flying to Texas very early Thursday morning to watch Formula 1 races. I want to take full advantage of my time away from the Great Lakes XD , and you’ve made me feel a little better. However because of Tom and Sandi, now i really want to go get that tablet tomorrow so i can upload my pics to dropbox before i come home, just in case! LoL
Enjoy the races! You’ll get some great shots there.
it looks like my card got erased. going from Santa Barbara, CA, they “notiiced” questionable contents at initial screening. I got flagged. Security re- xRayed 2 more time contents in my back-pack.
They determined cause of concern was from finger-nail clippers in toiletries bag. I guess I could have clipped someone to death on board?
Anyway, card I had in camera w/me held/downloaded pix w/out issue. Card in back-pack empty now.
Looking for resolution
tom
I just flew from Philadelphia to Tampa and when I got to Florida my memory card was damaged. I never took it out of the camera and it was in my camera inside a camera case and then inside a backpack. So how did it get damaged unless the machines at Philadelphia did the damage. I flew to Germany and back in July and all was fine.
I just went thru Boston Logan and used the newer large bin machine at TSA. Dropped everything in the bin and immediate after I got thru, Spotify was telling me No Storge Card. Restarted, took the card out and reinserted, nada. Thank you TSA. You ruined my day with zapping my 128G SD card with apps, files, audiobooks, audio, photos, videos. What a joke.