Canon Rebel XT Camera

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I'm going to move this to our camera corner where it will be more relevant, but what do you want to know about it? I just upgraded from a canon xti to a canon t4i.
 
I have some pictures i need to get off it. I tried linking it directly with a USB and no luck with any pictures coming up. I then bought a card reader and when I open the E: folder there are very few pictures but I can't even view them. They are .jpeg files but I tried with paint photoshop and windows picture viewer. Nothing will recognize the photos and open them up for viewing. Then I tried going to the camera menu and clicked on format and then okayed something that said 'format cf card' and now I can't find the pictures at all, even on the camera or computer. . .
 
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Formatting the card erases all the data so that's why you cant find them now. I'm not sure why they were missing before.
 
It's too late to save the pictures, if you've reformatted the card. Deleted files can sometimes be retrieved, but generally formatting gets rid of the information necessary to that process.

For what it's worth, though, this sounds more like a memory card problem than a camera problem. Before you take any pictures you care about, I'd try putting a new card in and see if you can successfully read the pictures both through the camera's USB interface and directly from the card. If you can, toss the first one, it's bad.

One more point: although memory cards are theoretically formatted when you buy them, as a practical matter some cameras are very picky about formatting. The very first time you use a card in a camera, before you take any pictures, put it in the camera and go through the in-camera format process (which, unfortunately, you've already discovered how to do). That way, the card will be properly formatted for that camera.

The Digital Photography School website had a recent post on care and feeding of memory cards.

One more caution: DO NOT use the Mac or Windows format utility to format the card with a computer, and NEVER delete images using the computer. Maybe you can get away with it with a particular combination of computer operating system and camera, but I have had several cameras which had problems with memory cards after I'd changed the files with a computer. Not always, and not every camera, but often enough to convince me it's a Bad Idea.

I just copy the images onto the computer hard drive from the card, and then reformat the card in the camera to start over. That always works. (And don't forget to back up your computer hard drive periodically - I've got a network drive on my home network, and my computer automatically copies everything which has changed since the last backup to the network drive every morning at 3AM).
 
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