I was helping a normally not too PC savvy friend move some files around recently, and she told me she was going to rename all the photo jpgs in her family photo collection to coordinate with the events. As there were several hundred pics I asked her if she thought this was a good idea. She then proceeded to show me a trick she had discovered a few weeks ago that I had never heard of.
In windows explorer (C:\Windows\Explorer.exe) pane where it shows the listed files she tagged the files she wanted to change, then selected “rename” and named the first file in the selected list “Birthday Party”, then hit enter, after a second or two ALL the selected pics were named “Birthday Party” and were sequenced "Birthday Party (1).jpg, “Birthday Party (2).jpg”, “Birthday Party (3).jpg”, as they occurred in sequence.
I was surprised as I never knew this feature existed. It’s quite a time saver if you’re trying to categorize photos.
That’s a possibility. There are batch file renamers out there though that could potentially be of more use.
For example:
PixRenamer is a freeware utility designed especially for digital picture files that’s pretty simple to use.
For more general-purpose batch renaming, ReNamer is another freeware utility wherein you can set up a sequence of events to occur on a selection of files for renaming.
There’s a bunch of freeware utilities for this purpose here so you can pick and choose one that works the way you’re comfortable with.
I have used the image viewer ACDSee for an extremely long time. It has a good template method for batch file renaming. I find it quite handy for non-photo file management purposes and use it far more than Explorer.
For really sophisticated file renaming, there’s nothing like a tcsh shell script for me. (Cygwin under MS-Windows if you are in that world.)