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TIL the DCIM directory stands for "Digital Camera Images"
(www.lifewire.com)
It's pronounced "Jim".
If GIF is "Jiff", then DCIM has to be "Jizz".
For quite a long while search engines would return amazing results when you searched for
Dsc-0001.jpg
And so on, perhaps with some variations based on camera model. People uploaded their DCIM folders to their homedirs which were sometimes exposed to the web. You'd see so much private stuff this way.
Just tried and it appears such functionality has been removed from Google, because of course it has.
Sad, you can still do this with youtube for the time being
Fantastic, that vid has 78 views as of now, I'm guessing 76 of them from today hahaha
It's down to 70 views for me. Someone's been disrupting the space-time continuum.
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I bet Google themselves can still see them though, for training their AI.
Why were their homedirs exposed to the web?
In the 90s and early 00's it was really common for Universities (for their students and professors) to arrange Unix based shell accounts for email and storage.
The Apache http server was easily configured to allow per user websites and this was commonly done to give everyone a website. They looked something like a "www.example.com/~username" URL which mapped to a public_html folder inside the user's home directory. Apache would serve up any files or html that lived inside to the public.
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/public_html.html
At the time, a lot of people didn't worry about anyone finding their obscure files, so put them there freely for family and friends.
Wild times!
Nostalgia in a bottle.
Reminds me of how you used to be able to control various unsecured IP security cams by typing part of the URL that is common among them into Google.
I remember stumbling upon some random office building in China and was able to fully control every camera in the place. I never did anything beyond pan them around a bit—and nobody ever reacted to my antics—so I guess the camera movements either weren't very obvious or staff was just used to being watched by management/random people.
It looks like you can still search for private directories with specific keywords.
So simple, yet so far away.
So it should have been DCI all this time. Or DICAIM.
Digital Camera Images, Man.
Thank you, I browsed this thread to see if anybody said this so I could save time and effort. So now I spend twice the amount of time and effort to thank you.
Fuck it.
Digital Camera Images, maaaaan
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Digital Camera Images. Multiple.
DCIS?
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I pronounce it as Daysim and you can't stop me
I pronounce it as day cum and you definitely can stop me
But I don't want to stop you
i can if i think up a worse way to pronounce it. i'm leaning tsee, like first consonant like tzatziki, and the M is silent
All of a Sim's strengths, none of their weaknesses.
Been there for ages I guess, I have a 2.0 MEGAPIXEL FujiFilm FinePix with a DCIM directory.
Came here to say pretty much the same - the two digital cameras I had before the "half-way decent cameras in your smartphone" age (including one which wasn't that specific model but a similar one from the same generation) both had a DCIM directory.
The only surprise I had around DCIM was at some point finding out that there was a directory with that name inside my Android phone since I expected everything would end up under Photos.
I had one of those cameras maybe 20 years ago, it took really good pictures. I used to carry it with me everywhere and always looked for artsy stuff to take pictures of.
Hahah same here, they did take good pictures even with the relatively low res sensor, I suppose all the extra room for camera optics helps as opposed to packing it all into a thin phone.
I think it's another Windows hangover, I first saw it as a USB Windows spec way back when MTP was a mode as well. Fucking Windows, fucking with the image storage on my android phones 20 years layer.
It's a DCF thing, not a Windows thing. A bunch of Japanese companies collaborated on a spec in the 90s so most digital cameras would work vaguely the same as far as file storage went and it's still the standard because it's a naming convention and there's not really a reason to change it.
It's a DCF thing, not a Windows thing.
Fair enough, interesting wiki read, thanks.
there's not really a reason to change it.
The fact that people revel in the newfound knowledge about why their photos aren't stored in the Photos folder in 2025 makes me think otherwise. 😁
Eh. :P
I mean sure it's kind of a relic from the 90s, but so is the save icon. If you change it you're breaking backwards compatibility with everything tangentially related to digital cameras prior to . A 'photos' folder might be more intuitive but then you run into the issue of "what about my language's folder" instead of just everyone worldwide using DCIM.
Sometimes its better long term for people to learn about a standard instead of for the standard to be more intuitive to newcomers. Sure you could just make a new standard but that's its own problem.
If websites are able to know what language my computer is using, I would expect local apps to have an easier time figuring it out. There's also the possibility of setting a default folder to save photos in. Right now I can only select DCIM on internal or SD storage.
And regarding standards, I don't accept the argument that there's an eternal and objective gold standard. It used to be standard to have 640k RAM. It used to be standard to store images in a DCIM folder for compatibility reasons. Do we need those compatibilities any more? I'd say no.
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Imagine if you were a malicious actor and you wanted a copy of all photos someone plugged into a computer that were not things like browser cache, just good honest to god OC.
All you have to do is listen on drive letters D, E, F, G and when one is plugged in with a DCIM directory... silently upload the data contents to a server over the internet when a drive is detected with that subdirectory.
Have you ever wondered why you couldn't eject a drive without rebooting? It's not like it's going to tell you what process is keeping it locked... Encryption wouldn't even matter, because you're gonna need to decrypt/unlock it to access it, and windows doesn't care what service or application is trying to access it, it is glad to allow any kind of file action without even admin rights.
Anywho, actor has your photo, AI trivially builds facial recognition models, pulls in timestamps, geolocation metadata, camera metadata... and now those photos you never intended to upload anywhere are in a database of PII that will be shared to god-knows-who.
I'm not sure how that's relevant? If the default folder was "Camera" or "Pictures" or whatever else your malware would just scan those directories and any real attack likely already does. You've only described how having malware on your machine compromises your machine, not exactly a groundbreaking revelation.
Windows hasn't been my main os for a while but I'm fairly certain you can mount/unmount drives without rebooting. That's certainly the case on Linux, and my distro definitely tells me what processes are locking drives when applicable.
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The unmounting needing a reboot seems very much a you problem.
I have managed over 1000 systems since XP days and never came across it.
You've never, ever plugged in a thumbdrive and then used the "safely remove hardware" tray to try and eject... only to receive an error that says "unable to remove, in use" or similar?
I guess i've never seen it happen when I was using a thumb drive to image a machine well over a decade ago.
There are a few people on the internet who seem to have reported this though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsHelp/comments/pnbfcf/this_device_is_currently_in_use_when_trying_to/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4212072/cant-eject-external-hard-drive
There are thousands of results of this. I have encountered this dozens of times personally across dozens of different systems.
You’ve never, ever plugged in a thumbdrive and then used the “safely remove hardware” tray to try and eject… only to receive an error that says “unable to remove, in use” or similar?
no, not even with those fake size ones.
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Thank you!! I move files around on android all the time and I see that folder constantly. I just never cared enough to look up what it stood for lmao.
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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