folder naming conventions

I wonder if anyone has any information on how the typical digital camera
folder naming convetions came about. I see that mostly within the memory
card there is a folder 'dcim' which most likely stands for 'Digital Camera
IMages' - quite reasonable. Then the photos are kept within a subfolder
'100abbreviatednameofcamera' - this seems a little superfluous to me - and
why 100 - why not 1 or 10 or 'photos' or just the pictures?

On Wed, 23 May 2007 09:16:20 -0600, ray wrote:

> I wonder if anyone has any information on how the typical digital camera
> folder naming convetions came about. I see that mostly within the memory
> card there is a folder 'dcim' which most likely stands for 'Digital Camera
> IMages' - quite reasonable. Then the photos are kept within a subfolder
> '100abbreviatednameofcamera' - this seems a little superfluous to me - and
> why 100 - why not 1 or 10 or 'photos' or just the pictures?

For various reasons, it wouldn't have been a good idea to keep
many hundreds or even thousands of pictures in a single folder, so
when enough (usually 100) pictures were taken, a new folder would be
created with the number incremented by 1. 'photos' or 'pictures'
wouldn't work, as the camera would then need to create 'photos1',
'photos2' etc., which would be no different than '100abbreviated...'
and '101abbreviated...", etc. As for why it started with 100,
probably to keep the number of digits constant. Defensive
programming in a sense, as it would make it harder for sloppily
written programs and utilities to foul up sorts, since so many of
them might use weird ordering such as '1xxx', '10xxx', '11xxx',
'2xxx', '3xxx' and so on.

On Wed, 23 May 2007 09:16:20 -0600, ray <ray@zianet.com>
wrote:

>I wonder if anyone has any information on how the typical digital camera
>folder naming convetions came about. I see that mostly within the memory
>card there is a folder 'dcim' which most likely stands for 'Digital Camera
>IMages' - quite reasonable. Then the photos are kept within a subfolder
>'100abbreviatednameofcamera' - this seems a little superfluous to me - and
>why 100 - why not 1 or 10 or 'photos' or just the pictures?

It's a JEITA specification called "Design rule for Camera
File system", a PDF of version 1 of the standard (1998) is
available here:

http://www.exif.org/dcf.PDF

--
John Bean