Work around for too many pictures on an SD card?

Question

A while back, I got my girlfriend an 8gb sd card for her camera, as she does a lot of picture taking. Having done a few special events, our card is now at probabley 5,000 pictures and is giving a "communication error" when trying to download the pictures to the computer.

After some searching, I found this issue comes when you have too many pictures on a card and it just chokes getting them off the card.

Is there a work around for this? Putting the card directly into a sd card reader that plugs in via usb doesn't seem to work.

At this point, we can just delete some of the pictures. It apparently stopped working between where it is now, and 3,000ish pictures when we last downloaded them. But I'd like to know if there is a work around anyone knows to get pictures off the camera.

Camera is a Cannon Powershot SD800

SD card is a Transcendence 8gb.

Answer 1

Instead of allowing a program to offload the pictures try going to Explorer and drag some off by hand and drop them into another directory. Or drag & drop them all in small batches.

Answer 2

The card reader must be SDHC compatible, not just SD compatible in order to work with your card.

If it turns out you were using  reader that was only SD compatible, I would  get a USB card reader able to read SDHC cards and give that a try.