TIL the DCIM directory stands for "Digital Camera Images"

It's pronounced "Jim".

Its actually "dickim”
If GIF is "Jiff", then DCIM has to be "Jizz".
- Yeah I did
- I don't understand what his personal life has to do with this, although I cannot provide doubt as to whether he has some junk in his trunk.

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.

I bet Google themselves can still see them though, for training their AI.
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.
Sad, you can still do this with youtube for the time being
- Amazing.
It looks like you can still search for private directories with specific keywords.
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!

neat

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
Dick aim? 🤔
Digital Camera Images. Multiple.
- DCIS?
It should have been not abbreviated this whole time.

So simple, yet so far away.

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 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.
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 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
All of a Sim's strengths, none of their weaknesses.
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

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.

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.
- 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.
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/Windows11/comments/12t8pwo/i_cant_eject_any_storage_even_if_nothing_obvious/
  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
  https://www.reddit.com/r/LenovoLegion/comments/uv5uag/cant_safely_eject_usb_drives_on_legion_716achg6/
  There are thousands of results of this. I have encountered this dozens of times personally across dozens of different systems.
Read about magic bytes
You'd be surprised (or maybe not) at how many people name folders or files, "your eyes only"