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My iPhone 12 Pro is not recognizing my SD card - lightning reader

I have a third party SD/MicroSD to Lighting reader that I use to view my dashcam footage. My iPhone X on iOS 13.6 can view the contents of the MicroSD easily, both in the Files App and Photos App.


My iPhone 12 Pro (iOS 14.1) does not recognize the card at all. I’ve tried renaming and reformatting the card, rebooting my phone, all to no avail. I do not want to restore/reset my iPhone; I don’t know if it would fix the problem and I finally got my iPhone set up the way I like it.


At the moment, if I want to view the SD card, I have to connect it to my iPhone X and then airdrop the videos to my iPhone 12. It’s a pain.

iPhone 12 Pro, iOS 14

Posted on Nov 16, 2020 4:10 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 21, 2020 7:33 PM

So I went out and bought an official Apple SD Card Reader, and it worked perfectly fine with my iPhone 12 Pro. I guess Apple put something in the new hardware/software to stop third party readers from working.

11 replies

Nov 26, 2020 11:14 PM in response to Stephen Guimond

Nothing. Apple Support was useless. What finally worked was spending $30 to buy an official Apple SD Card Reader, just to see if the issue was specific to that third-party reader. It turns out the Apple reader works perfectly, so the problem must be either a software change in iOS 14.1 or a hardware change in the iPhone 12 models that don’t recognize third-party readers.

My iPhone 12 Pro is not recognizing my SD card - lightning reader

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