No matter on what type of gadget you take photos with, you’ll have to find them in a DCIM folder. Even if you have a folder that says Camera, which many times misleads you, the pictures are always stored in DCIM folder. DCIM stands for Digital Camera Images. So, even when you’re not using a digital camera as such and are using a phone with a digital camera or an iPod with a digital camera, the pictures inevitably get stored in this folder.
So, what’s DCIM? To get to know about DCIM, we should first meet DCF. DCF is a Design rule for Camera File system and it is a specification created by JEITA, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association. DCF is responsible for defining the file system of digital cameras as we can infer from its expansion. What comprises of a file system are the directory structure, file naming method, character set, file format, and metadata format. The same sort of file system exists in the memory card you’d use for digital cameras. Basically, what DCF is trying to do is making digital cameras compatible to their memory cards. And DCIM is the folder in which images should be stored according to DCF.
But DCIM folder has many similarly enigmatically named subfolders. What are they?
DCIM directory consists of a subfolder which is named with three digit numbers followed by five alphabets in caps. Eg: 100ANDRO or 101APPLE. These characters are chosen by the camera makers as long as they follow the syntax. Inside this folder, you’ll see the actual images you’ve taken. Each image is named with a four-digit alphanumeric code followed by a four digit number after which, you may or may not be able to see the format of the file such as jpg, wav, mp4.
My phone doesn’t store my pictures in 100ANDRO-type named subfolder. Why? Yes, this is possible. Phones may create a new folder called Camera under the DCIM folder where pictures are stored. Sometimes, this additional folder is created but the images stay in 100ANDRO-type named folder itself. It depends on your phone’s software configuration.
I have more subfolders in DCIM in my phone but they’re not named in the three digit five alphabet format. Why?
Another thing about phones, more specifically, smart phones, is that they may create additional folders for each app you use, such as Facebook, WhatsApp and the like. And relevant images are stored in relevant folders. These are not the ones you’ve clicked using your normal digital camera application but with the help of other Apps. Or they might have been downloaded or uploaded with these Apps.
What is .thumbnail?
That folder automatically creates thumbnail sized pictures of all the photos you’ve taken. This is done so that your pictures can be displayed in a faster fashion in the gallery mode. Deleting the thumbnails won’t impact your original pictures. And, deleting the pictures will automatically delete the corresponding thumbnail.
Why DCF?
DCF is accepted as a defacto standard. It’s not a crime if a digital camera decides to use a folder named Photos as it’s default, but this just means that the memory card will face a lot of synchronization issues. It is by the use of this standard that your computer can detect, synchronize and auto-play pictures when a phone or a memory card is connected to it. It makes it a lot easier to have everything in the same format. It doesn’t matter if it is DCF or something else, but since DCF has always been used and is ubiquitous, there’s no point in using some other standard from scratch and proliferate it all over again.
