Everyone seems to be ignoring
Valikao89’s post. It might be the best approach for saving the photos. If the computer is able to format the card it might work.
Some cameras erase the card with a format. My old Olympus C50 did that. Other cameras just rewrite the FAT showing the space is available for overwrite but don’t actually erase the photos. A Windows format of a hard drive doesn’t erase the drive and I assume formatting your card in Windows does the same.
Any format will make the photos accessible only with recovery software. The hooker to the format approach is that something has to read the card before it will format it. And if you want to try to preserve the photos you would want to make sure a camera format didn’t erase everything on the card. Many cameras come with a useless small card that would be good for experimenting.
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There are no warnings that I've ever seen about card readers corrupting cards.
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I haven’t seen any either, but I’ve seen a lot of posts where it happened that way. Card storing and reviewing fine in camera – put card in card reader and it will no longer work in either the camera or reader. The coincidence of the card working fine until inserted in a card reader is getting too frequent to ignore IMO.
There could be user error involved. It’s pretty hard to put a card into the camera wrong but most card readers don’t feel just right. The only card I read in my card reader is the mini-SD card from my cellphone camera. It never feels right inserting it. I thought it might be the adapter, but I tried a regular SD card and it was the same. I push it in until there is a little resistance then look at the drive letter. If it isn’t showing I push it a little further. It isn’t like the camera where it slides in smoothly and locks when in place with only one place you can put it.
If I had to guess I would say people are doing physical damage to the card – maybe the contacts. Or maybe the card has an internal weakness and some card readers hit it with a little harder current than the camera does. In that case the card reader would just exacerbate a problem already in the card.
But I’ve run across many posts here and on other boards where the last time a card worked was just before it was put into a card reader. there seems to be some liability in using a card reader. Maybe just some models.