Today’s Question: I’m using a USB hub that includes a card reader to download photos when importing them into Lightroom Classic. This works great for the first import, but when I then insert another card into the reader the card is not found. How can I import from the second (or third) card without having to restart my computer?
Tim’s Quick Answer: When you eject a card from a card reader the reader itself is disconnected as a device. That means you’ll generally need to physically disconnect and reconnect the card reader in order to download images from another card, which for a card reader that is part of a USB hub means you’ll need to disconnect and reconnect the hub itself.
More Detail: When you need to remove a media card from a card reader or disconnect a storage device from the computer, it is best to always use the option in your operating system to safely remove the device. In Lightroom Classic when you import from a removable device you can turn on the “Eject after import” checkbox to have the device automatically disconnected without having to go through the operating system, so you can simply disconnect the device after the import has completed.
When a card reader is the device that is disconnected, in many cases it will be the reader itself that has been disconnected, rather than just the media card that was inserted into the card reader. You’ll therefore need to physically unplug the card reader and then plug it in again when you want to import photos from another card.
If the card reader is part of a USB hub device, that means you’ll generally need to unplug the USB hub since you can’t simply unplug the reader that is built into that hub. This can add an additional challenge, since you may have an external hard drive connected to the USB hub. If so, you would need to safely remove any other storage devices before unplugging the USB hub, so you can then plug the hub back in to gain access to all connected accessories, including the media card reader.
