How much space does a high resolution photo take up on your memory card?

It depends on a few things.

1. Exactly how high is the resolution? 5 MP (which would be about 2600, 2000 pixels), 10 MP, 20 MP? Depending on its intended use, the relative term "high resolution" could mean a number of things. It could even mean 1 MP depending on the situation.

2. What format is the picture in? For example, TIFF, various RAW formats, and Jpeg are all common for photographs. What is the source and what is the format? TIFFs are huge files, RAW files are very big, and jpegs, the most common, are reasonably small. (RAW files straight out of an SLR are about three times the size of a jpeg.)

3. If it is jpeg, what is the compression level (between 1 and 12, or between 1% and 100%)? For example, a 5 MP image with high-quality compression (like 100% or level 12) could take up a couple megabites, while the same picture at a lower compression of 5 could be about 400 KB. A compression of level 10 is fairly common out of cameras, and a 5 MP photograph with level 10 compression could be just over 1 MB.

4. To a lesser extent, how complex is the picture? For example, a solid black background with a yellow smily face would take up less room than a complex, sharp photograph of a forrest.

So, to take assumptions, a 10 MP jpeg at level 10 JPEG compression of a typical picture could be about 3 MB.

It should be noted that the picture takes up no more room on a memory card than it does on a computer hard drive. However, if you want to know what portion of the memory card is used by the photo, it depends on the size of the card. For a typical 512 MB memory card and the example of a 3 MB file size photo, the photo would take up about 1/170th of the card.

Of course, any of my assumed variables can be very different resulting in a very different storage usage.