How do I treat my Canon IXUS as a removable drive/card reader?

April 26, 2008 3:11 AM

How do I bypass Windows XP's digital camera photo download tool? Or to be more precise, how do I treat my Canon IXUS 75 as a card reader?

I want to put a couple of mp3s onto my SD card to take round to a friends house but can only seem to download things from the camera and not put them on. The windows xp downloader seems to be stopping me but I cannot see a way around this. Can anyone help?

I simply want to be able to turn on my camera and view the memory card as a removable drive like I can with other devices.

posted by aqueousdan to computers & internet (6 comments total)

You probably want to remove the card from the camera and connect it directly to your PC. I have a laptop with a card-slot in it that does this well. For my work machine, I use a cheap SD-to-USB adapter.
posted by mmahaffie at 5:19 AM on April 26, 2008

I don't know if you can do this. As far as I know the Ixus series can only be used as PTP devices, not as mass storage devices, which means that they don't support this. Maybe there is something in the settings menu to change the connection method, but I couldn't see anything on mine. Sorry. You'll have to use a card reader or something if you want to put some files on that memory card.
posted by gds at 5:23 AM on April 26, 2008

On the plus side, card readers cost about $0 on eBay these days.

I suggest you get a single-slot, SD-only reader, unless you know you're going to have to read other card types. Multi-slot readers are not only larger (an SD-only reader with a card in it is only marginally bulkier than a standard "thumb drive"), but also annoying because they'll usually give you at least a couple of "empty" drives which may or may not be easy to tell from the slot that has the card in it.
posted by dansdata at 7:14 AM on April 26, 2008

This is a piece of software designed to do what you want. It's linked from this camera developer's page so I'm confident it's legit, but I haven't tried it myself.
posted by Eater at 8:28 AM on April 26, 2008

Canon cameras cannot be used as a card reader. Blame Canon, not Microsoft. (Well, Microsoft built this method for interfacing with digicams, but Canon could have chosen to have it appear as a card reader rather than a camera)

You can get a card reader for a few bucks on eBay (I lucked out and got mine for under a dollar with free shipping).
posted by winston at 9:37 AM on April 26, 2008

Thanks for the answers guys... the other half reminded me that we had a card reader in the drawer right next to me :S

Sorry to have wasted your time, lets just hope this information is useful to someone else :)
posted by aqueousdan at 2:33 AM on April 27, 2008