I have Kubuntu 15.10 and for the first time ever I am having problems copying photos from a flash drive. Every now and again the connection seems to go (I have checked and it is all connected fine) and a file fails to copy.
As it is about one file in 10 and I have 300 photos (150 raw and 150 jpg) to copy this is taking a long time.
I did copy photos from this card last week without problems.

Any ideas?
I will of course tomorrow turn it off and on again.

What diagnostics have you tried where you can share further information?

Copying how: UI or command line? Has anything changed with the operating system? Has anything changed in your hardware? Does this card work otherwise fine on other systems? When you see this problem are there any system logs which occur? Are there any unusual system logs which occur when you mount the card? Run fsck on that card and also report what "fdisk <device-name> -l" gives you.

I was copying using the UI and then I tried cp and every few files it says something like "input/output error".
I will check fsck tonight, thanks for your help.

It sounds to me like the card is on its way out.

Well I will not use it again but the photos looked fine on the camera a few days ago.

Given that it's a camera, compact flash card or something else?

Depends how old and how much former use. Could be the reader/writer. Could be something else. Knowing what card type it is and how it is physically inserted may help. One computer I have, had a multi-reader installed, another one has the typical USB plug in multi-card reader. Compact flash cards ... I've seen bent/broken pins on the reader/writer side, but then they just don't work at all, in fact nothing ends up working. Meanwhile with microSD and a full SD sized adapter, I've had the adapter holder become unreliable and really only detected it when I put a brand new microSD card into it and had to question why things were still not working. In the end, best case is that it is just the card, cards are cheap. Get the data off of it and use a new one. I find having a fresh one available as a backup is always good, i.e. if you can buy a 2-pack or 3-pack when you get the card, it fills that "you never know" case.

could be the card can't keep up with the computer
maybe you could copying fewer files
copy the files in just one directory at a time
or a tighter range like cp 05*.tif ~/photos then cp 06*.tif ~/photos