My camera background is originally from film photography and I would always say roll of film and never say camera roll.
Perhaps this phrase may originate in Apple product terminology.
It seems an odd way to word it as it seems to refer to the device and not the end product.
There's no roll of camera to begin with and there's no film in the digital realm.
I would have suggested "film roll" but they didn't ask me.
Does camera roll perhaps derive from blog roll, that being a list of sites the blogger appreciates and promotes? I presume that further derives from attendance roll. In the Methodist tradition, one does not join the church until the age of 12, and the younger children of member families were entered in the church's cradle roll.
One thinks in the Hollywood tradition of "Roll 'Em!", meaning to start the movie cameras, and the scene action, but I think camera roll started being used when phones were still limited to still pics.
I admit I wasn't familiar with the term blog roll but had seen them without knowing the name. There's something illogical about the phrase Camera Roll to me. Perhaps the term may derive from the kind of endless loop of the images as you navigate through them. I first saw this visual representation of album covers on my iPod nano, which is my only Apple product. I think, without any research, that the Camera Roll phrase usage probably preceded blog roll's.
Well here's the Google Ngram for those terms. Not surprisingly, it all starts around the time moving pictures were invented. In these digital days, the use of "roll" in any form to describe a series of images is what we've called an "archaic" or "antiquated" word in other threads, or more generally, an "anachronism." A lot of this is driven by technology.
All for now. I'm heading into my home theater to see what's on the chip tonite. 🙂
I don't know enough about how ngram works to know if the order of the search terms is relevant. Specifically, does "camera roll" give the same results as "roll camera"? NB: I just tried it with two separate searches each with the different word order and the results appear to differ significantly. Now I wonder what's the significance of the different results. My idea was to attempt to eliminate the command phrase "roll, camera!" I don't know how to evaluate a lengthy gap in the corpus for "roll camera". I still need more ngram learning.