V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 176
Essentially, the standards committees put together by the early
digital camera manufacturers were trying to establish a set of
rules that made it easier to interchange data between
connecting devices. So while the standards seem arcane and
confusing, remember they’re actually there to make the user
experience simpler. Really.
One problem with DCF is that almost all of the firmware in
cameras was being designed using a relative of DOS, and that
operating system (and its ancestors) used a specification that
produced short filenames (called “8 dot 3” by those of us who
go back that far in high tech, because the name consists of
eight characters, a period, and a three-letter file extension).
This limited size for the name makes for some serious issues
that we camera users now have to deal with.
As with current personal computers, files are organized in our
cameras within a hierarchy of folders, so you need to
understand both the folder structure and the file naming
standards.
Folders
The top-level folder for a digital camera is named
DCIM
(Digital Camera Images—all image storage occurs in the
structure underneath this folder). Within the
DCIM
folder,
digital cameras place one or more additional folders, each of
which can have up to 999 images in them.
On the D300, Nikon names the first such folder
100ND300
,
the second
101ND300
, and so on.
DCIM
+----100ND300
+----101ND300
Like all previous professional Nikon DSLRs, we don’t get to
override the name (though we can change the three-digit
number prefix). I’ll get to how you make prefix changes in a