Each camera or digital camera, including those of Android or iPhone smartphones, saves the photos taken in a folder called DCIM . DCIM stands for " Digital Camera Images " or photos of the digital camera.
The DCIM folder and its structure are part of the DCF standard created in 2003 by JEITA, a Japanese association of electronics and information technology companies.
DCF's goal was to ensure interoperability of file system formats so that memory cards were compatible with any digital camera.
DCF is a standard adopted by almost all cameras and smartphones.
According to DCF, every digital camera must keep the photos in a folder called " DCIM " which is what you find when you try to explore the camera memory card to transfer photos to your computer.
The standardized DCIM format identifies photos taken by a digital camera on the computer.
The DCIM directory can contain several other folders, each with a five-character name and a three-digit number from 100 to 999.
The letters are different depending on the camera manufacturer: for example on Apple devices it has the name 100APPLE while on each Android smartphone the folder has the name 100ANDRO .
Inside each sub-folder are the image files, which represent the photos taken.
The name of each file begins with an alphanumeric code, which can be anything, followed by four digits.
For example, often in cameras the files are called DSC_0001.jpg, DSC_0002.jpg and so on.
Numbers ensure the photos taken are sortable by date.
Basically, the structure of the file system in a camera can be summarized as follows:
DCIM
100ANDRO
DCF_0001.JPG
DCF_0002.JPG
DCF_0003.WAV
101ANDRO
...
102ANDRO
...
The reason there are several subfolders is that a memory's performance collapses when there are too many files inside.
To overcome the problem of too many files, the photos are placed in sub-folders that never contain more than 1000 items inside.
Inside the folders where the photos are saved, there can also be the .thm files, which represent the metadata for the JPG files.
For example, if a video was shot with the digital camera and stored in an MP4 file, the file will have the name DSC_0001.MP4 and the file DSC_0001.THM will also be created.
The MP4 file is the video, while the .THM file contains the thumbnail and other metadata, i.e. video information such as the thumbnail.
It is useful to know all this not only for personal culture, but above all to always be able to find the photo folder in any digital camera or mobile phone camera .
By connecting your smartphone or camera to a computer you can find the DCIM folder and browse the photos to view or transfer them without using external programs or applications.
With DCIM, the Windows system and photo management software automatically detect and import photos to your computer.
Without DCIM you could not take an SD card from one camera to use it on another and view photos without having to reformat it and delete everything.
After transferring photos to the computer, the problem may be that the names of the photos taken with the same camera are always the same.
In another article, therefore, we saw how to resize and rename images and photos "in batch", all at once.
