Many USB media readers, such as USB Compact Flash readers, let you manipulate Compact Flash media on your desktop or laptop machine as if the media was an external hard drive. While this is great in that it makes it much easier to copy files from your digital camera's media to your hard drive, you might start performing other operations on the media, such as deleting or renaming files.

Unfortunately, doing advanced file operation on digital camera media may lead to problems. Each camera expects the files on the media device to be arranged a certain way, i.e. some even set up special preview directories. Thus, after you are done copying over your photographs from your Compact Flash or other media, and making a backup copy or two, you may want to format the media in your camera as per your camera instructions before using it again to take pictures. Failure to do this might result in corrupt files, photographs you thought you took not showing up later, or other "bad things".

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