Why SO many random DCIM Folders? I want ONE!

Apple changed the way it worked for a reason. It was entirely intentional. And if you use the right tools it will work on a PC as well as it does on a Mac. You have deliberately chosen to use the wrong tools, and you want the world to support your use of them. It isn't going to happen. You remind me of the anguish when Windows started allowing file names of more than 8 characters. While Apple is the first to change the way images are managed, they aren't going to be the last. I'm sure Android phones will move to the new approach soon, because the current way of managing digital images is the equivalent of 8 character filenames. It isn't just the folder structure; there are other significant differences that Windows Explorer doesn't know about either.

The digital photo standards have changed over the past few years. The right tools have kept up with it. iOS 8 is the first smartphone operating system to take advantage of the new standards. They apply to how digital images are saved and modified. Specifically, Apple has implemented the XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) standard. Prior to this if you edited an image file you lost the original file, unless you saved it separately. If you made a lot of edits over time, unless you saved each intermediate version, there was no way to backtrack through your changes. XMP changes that. Any editor that uses XMP (like the iPhone camera) keeps a "sidecar" file that tracks the changes to the image, so the original and every intermediate remains available. XMP data can be included in the jpg, or kept as a separate file (with the .AAE type), as Apple has chosen to do, because not all programs understand embedded XMP yet.

as an apple i phone user it would have been a smart business decision to let its customers know and how to use it.

PS Apple censored one of my comments and sent me a nasty letter saying i was a bad boy...i am so done!

Well i guess you are the the Chief judge and can determine right and wrong for other.

I insulted no one...i did however respond to being insulted...but i guess you didn't see that

And it would be nice if there was some rules of integrity of Apple to fix this issue and make it as easy to access not harder

but dare i say the king has no clothes

When i said i was so done i didn't mean this forum but apple products....and thanks for helping me solidify my decision.

it is that pervasive attitude that makes me glad for you to see me go :-)

Dear T-Minator

THANKS so very much! This is a brilliant tip.

I was growing desperate someone would actually reply with some sort of solution (other than "import everything and start sorting").

This really helped.

Also, I'd like to say I've never used the photo stream (iCloud), it's disabled on my phone, and yet I seem to have zillions of these "local disk" files... I don't know why.

Anyway, thanks a bunch :-)

The "Local Disk" files don't have anything to do with photo stream or saving to iCloud. They are created when you edit a photo within the Photos App. For example, remove red-eye, crop, or brighten an image...things like that. I believe it creates this Local Disk file because it gives us the ability to revert the edited photo back to its original state. The Local Disk file contains the edit data (my guess). I do know that if you delete that particular photo from your phone or revert it back to its unedited state, the Local Disk file for that particular photo disappears. A Local Disk file will appear for each photo that's been edited.

One problem with this is, when we edit a photo in the Photos App and use Windows Explorer to copy the photo over to our PC, it will not save the edited version of the photo, only the original. You have to import edited photos to your computer using another method to be able to save the edited version.

tab1075 wrote:

The "Local Disk" files don't have anything to do with photo stream or saving to iCloud. They are created when you edit a photo within the Photos App. For example, remove red-eye, crop, or brighten an image...things like that. I believe it creates this Local Disk file because it gives us the ability to revert the edited photo back to its original state. The Local Disk file contains the edit data (my guess). I do know that if you delete that particular photo from your phone or revert it back to its unedited state, the Local Disk file for that particular photo disappears. A Local Disk file will appear for each photo that's been edited.

One problem with this is, when we edit a photo in the Photos App and use Windows Explorer to copy the photo over to our PC, it will not save the edited version of the photo, only the original. You have to import edited photos to your computer using another method to be able to save the edited version.

Those "local disk" files are not local disk at all. You are correct, they are a file type that stupid Windows Explorer does not understand, but any photo management app will understand, and they are a standard "sidecar" file for saving, as you say, edits you have made to the image.

PLEASE HELP ME WITH MY PHOTO BACK UP DILEMMA
how do you import them all at the same time?

I have to click inside every folder, copy the pictures, and paste them on my computer. and when I plug the phone in later again, I don't know which folders are already on my computer because it moves around the photos in different folders.

plus I categorize my photos on my laptop (friends, work, school,....) so what is the easiest way to sync my new photos to computer and only getting the new pictures imported to my computer.

i've been uploading to dropbox but now that's full, and I don't want to pay $10 a month just to back up photos on dropbox

I'm a designer and I constantly have to use my phone to snap shot the screen or take pics of clients homes so I really need an organized system to be able to come back and find a picture or an idea i saved and keep my personal photos out.

I would really appreciate your help with this.

Guys I skimmed through all the pages of discussion and what I could figure out the best workaround for copying pics to windows is as follows.

We have to type * in the search option in the windows explorer and then copy the pics one by one or we can right click to locate the folder and then copy multiple pictures.

Please correct me if there is other better way of doing, that I have missed as its difficult to read each post in detail. Special thanks to those who shared this workaround, making the job easier.

And Yes for deleting pics going to individual folders seems the only option……….. 😟

You could do it the way Microsoft designed Windows to import images from ANY digital camera: use the Camera and Scanner Wizard rather than Windows Explorer. Then you will never see the folders. It can even delete the images after copying. Or you can delete them using the Photos app on the phone.

Thanks Finch, however what you shared is probably best way
if one wants to copy all the pics in one go. But for copying only the selected
photos, the solution I mentioned after learning from this forum seems the
better choice. Am I right ?

No. The camera and scanner wizard does not require that all images be copied. You can also use a photo management app in windows to selectively copy, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, Google Picasa, or even Microsoft's photo manager. All of these have the advantage of preserving any edits that you made on the phone, or special settings that you chose in the camera app. If you just copy the images the customization data in the "sidecar" edit tracking files are lost.

An easy way to do this is by searching for a specific date that photo was taken. Go to the DCIM folder and type the following in the search box: "datemodified:4/20/2015" Type it together with no space and no quote. Change the date to the date that the photo was taken.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

An even easier way is to use the right tools rather than the wrong tools.

But using Windows Explorer is not the "wrong" tool. Or at least it wasn't before an update to iOS 8. Up until that point, using Windows Explorer to view and transfer photos to a PC worked perfectly. I don't know how many times this has to be said. Simply because we use a different method doesn't make it wrong. For those of us who want to continue to use Windows Explorer to manage photos, oh well, let it go. Some of us have sent feedback to Apple in hopes of getting it better organized (as it was before the change). In the meantime, we can keep people informed of a work-around. Or if anyone, such as yourself, wants to offer different methods of transferring photos (which you have), that's great, but coming back here just to tell us we're doing it wrong isn't helping anyone.

And Csound1 has already admitted to not even using a Windows PC, so he doesn't even experience this issue. Yet he keeps returning to this thread to tell everyone they're doing it wrong. That, my friend, is a textbook troll.

WIndows explorer was always the wrong tool. By coincidence it worked, because the camera app was so primitive. But the camera app has become more capable, and the old model that worked when all you needed to transfer was an image file does not support the new editing features of the camera app. You will see the same situation going forward with newer generation cameras.

I can see that other tools may work better than File Explorer in Windows for the reasons you mentioned. However, some people here are looking for a quick and easy way to access and share photos on any PC without telling your friend to install more software they may not want. Installing a quick device driver and using File Explorer may be a far less intrusive method.

Frankly, there is a much better way to share than what I previously suggested, namely Google+. It automatically uploads my iPhone's photos to my Google+ account which I can share with anyone who has a browser. Best part: it's free, unlimited storage for both photos and videos under 15 min long.

So for online access and sharing of mobile photos and video, the best solution I've seen is free, unlimited Google+.