If you’re like me you have five or six BP-511 style batteries for your SLR. And, going out on shoots, coming back from shoots and during shoots, it can be a challenge keeping track of which ones are charged. Some of the batteries came with weak plastic trays that never stay on when tossed in your bag. Other times these batteries (or their knockoffs) come with a cap that can help protect the battery, but I always seem to lose those.

So I use this method to protect my batteries and keep track if they’re charged or spent. And my solution uses the miracle of gaffer’s tape: An Informative Battery Case

One of the beauties of gaffer’s tape is that when you stick it to itself, it makes a flexible, strong, grippy material not entirely unlike leather. I guess you could also do this with duct tape or some packing tape. That is, if you’re a punk!

My roll of tape is 1 and 7/8 inches, or about 47mm. Tear off a strip about 28cm long. Wrap it around the battery sticky side out. Make it as tight as you can, the more snug the better.

When the battery is wrapped, double back around being careful to line up the tape. This gives you a basic tube. Then I tear off two shorter strips for the bottom.Stick a short strip to a slightly longer strip, and curl that around the bottom end of the battery. You can then layer another strip around the tube overlapping your bottom cup.

Now when I have a newly charged battery, I slide it in with the contacts down and protected. When I swap it out for a spent battery, I slide the empty in with the contacts up and visible.

Of course, I can have this same issue with rechargeable batteries for my speedlights. In this case, the clamshell cases for them are usually exceedingly solid. So on the edge of a small strip of paper, I write “GOOD” and “BAD” side by side. I snip out the strip, fold it in half, and tape it into inside of the batteries’ clamshell case with a ‘T’ of transparent tape. This makes a flap that can go either way and is visible when there are batteries in the case.

I originally tried determining a “top” and “bottom” to the clamshell case and deciding that if the positive pointed up, then the batteries were good. However, I could never remember what I had decided was “up”. So, that’s why I went with this no-thinking method.

With Compact Flash cards, determining a top is much easier because their makers are eager to use a flashy logo on one side of the card. So in the clamshell case that holds CF cards, I put in a piece of colored tape or the sticky part of a Post-It note. Then I have little trouble remembering that if I can see the logo, the card is empty and ready for use. If the logo is covered, then it’s full of wonderful photos just waiting to be processed.

This is what works for me. Do you have your own methods to solve these problems?