Or, maybe you’d like to separate those wedding photos you snapped at the ceremony
from those taken at the reception. As I mentioned earlier, the Nikon D7000 automat-
ically creates a folder on a newly formatted memory card with a name like 100D7000,
and when it fills with 999 images, it will automatically create a new folder with a num-
ber incremented by one (such as 101D7000). To create your own folder:
1. Choose Active Folder in the Shooting menu.
2. Scroll down to New Folder Number and press the multi selector right button.
3. A three-number value, such as 101, appears. Use the left/right multi selector but-
tons to change from one column to the next to modify the hundreds, tens, or sin-
gle digits from 100 up to 999. Use the up/down multi selector buttons to increment
or decrement the values in the currently selected column.
4. Press OK when finished to create and activate the new folder.
File Naming
The D7000, like other cameras in the Nikon product line, automatically applies a name
like _DSC0001.jpg or DSC_0001.nef to your image files as they are created. You can
use this menu option to change the names applied to your photos—but only within
certain strict limitations. In practice, you can change only three of the eight characters,
the DSC portion of the file name. The other five are mandated either by the Design
Rule for Camera File System (DCF) specification that all digital camera makers adhere
to or to industry conventions.
DCF limits file names created by conforming digital cameras to a maximum of eight
characters, plus a three-character extension (such as JPG or NEF) that represents the
file format of the image. The eight-plus-three (usually called 8.3) length limitation dates
back to an evil and frustrating computer operating system that we older photographers
would like to forget (its initials are D.O.S), but which, unhappily, lives on as the wraith
of a file-naming convention.
Of the eight available characters, four are used to represent, in a general sense, the type
of camera used to create the image. By convention, one of those characters is an under-
line, placed in the first position (as in _DSCxxxx.xxx) when the image uses the Adobe
RGB color space (more on color spaces later), and in the fourth position (as in
DSC_xxxx.xxx) for sRGB and RAW (NEF) files. That leaves just three characters for
the manufacturer (and you) to use. Nikon, Sony, and some other vendors use DSC
(which may or may not stand for Digital Still Camera, depending on who you ask),
while Canon prefers IMG. The remaining four characters are used for numbers from
0000 to 9999, which is why your D7000 “rolls over” to DSC_0000 again when the
9999 number limitation is reached.
Chapter 8 ■Setup: Playback and Shooting Menus 231