Is there an advantage to importing photos from my camera rather than copying them directly to my harddisk?

Question

I heard from a photographer that treating one's SD card as a filesystem and using Windows explorer to directly copy and paste photos out of it can reduce its life. He suggested one must always use the Import feature instead, even though it's slower. I don't know how far this is true, and if so, why. I see no mention of this directly on the web anywhere. I could only come up with one guess: perhaps importing files forces access to the card to be sequential, whereas copying out of the filesystem could be random access, thereby requiring more accesses and possibly reducing the card's life. It still sounds unlikely to me. Can someone comment? Thanks.

Answer 1

There should be no difference, importing is usually done with a utiity program provided by the maker. He may be talking about the fact that memory cards (flash memory) have a limited number of writes, although that number is well over 10,000. To reduce this problem, the controller in the camera (not in the computer) will adjust where the pictures are actually stored (for example, my camera can take 560 SVGA pictures, but usually - except on a long special trip - I usually take one to three dozen and then move them. If the controller did not adjust, the first dozen spaces would have a couple of hundred uses by now and the last 400 only 2 or 3.)

Answer 2

I doubt it is a real issue. I'd rather wear out the contacts on an SD card - if that is possible - than wear out the USB plug in my camera or run down my batteries needlessly. I don't think accessing the card is the issue at all, as there are no moving parts.