Why Are Photos Stored in a DCIM Folder?
www.lifewire.com
Your digital camera, smartphone, or other device that takes photos almost always stores those photos in a DCIM folder—but why?
  • nucleative@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    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.

      • nucleative@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        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!

  • timhayes1991@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    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.

  • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    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.

    • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      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.

    • Beacon@fedia.io
      0·
      13 days ago

      If someone else has the ability to upload any of your files then the name of your folders is completely unimportant.

      • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        How do you know that the latest version of a piece of software that auto updated on your computer doesn’t have anything snooping on your hard drive and uploading whatever it wants somewhere?

        Think about it. How would you know? Let’s assume it’s not using a bug, exploit or vulnerability.

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      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

      Windows PowerToys has had this as a function for a long as I can remember. Before that there were programs which existed only to tell you what process was keeping a folder or drive open. On Linux lsof can do this for you.

      • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        I have power toys… well on my windows dual boot anyway. Do normal users? Probably not.

        I’ve used unlocker tools in the past as well, but this is not something provided in the OS and as such not something a typical user is even aware of, let alone has available.

        • Ghoelian@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          13 days ago

          You can just install it if you do need it to debug something on their pc though. There’s probably even portable versions you don’t have to install at all.

      • otacon239@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        On top of this, it’s usually because the local cache hasn’t actually written all the data to the drive and if you go yanking the drive in this state, your most recent chunk of data would be missing or corrupt. The eject button forces your OS to clear its write cache before unmounting the file system.

        But that’s a lot less of an exciting answer.

      • LikeableLime@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        Powertoys should be installed by default. Its a testament to how out of touch MS is that they leave all these great features as a little known optional install. Almost every single thing in power tools should be in windows outright.

        I use it on any machine that I have to use windows on, and tell everyone I can about it. Just feels like such a miss to leave those features out of the OS

    • my_hat_stinks@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      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.

      • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        Windows hasn’t been my main os for a while but I’m fairly certain you can mount/unmount drives without rebooting.

        I work in IT for a living. Sometimes something keeps your drive locked. Windows does not confess. I wasn’t talking about linux user experience because most people don’t use linux like we do.