Sorry, been unwell again the last few weeks. I was wondering the same thing a few months ago as part of something else (finding WM/shell during runtime). Would it be better to look at implementing/following XDG? We use it for menus and autostart iirc but not sure about user-dirs.dirs. As I understand it we could just add XDG_CAMERA_DIR to the config file and use that where needed. The trouble then is Glib doesn't seem to have a direct (GUserDirectory) method of using this, it would require manually processing the config file for each app or just creating a routine within libhildonfm/libhildon.

OR, we cheat and just make it XDG_PICTURES_DIR/DCIM

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...er_directories
or for a N9 example:
https://fravaccaro.wordpress.com/201...r-screenshots/

Edit:
For custom paths, reading the config file would need something like xdg_user_dir_lookup_with_fallback
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg...r-dir-lookup.c