awesome short cut for picture renaming in XP!!

[miss missy]

found this trick and it works great! I have over 600 WDW pics to rename from that stupid number name programs give them. This is great! You must have them in one folder for this to work.

Rename your digital photos automatically in Windows XP Have a tip to share? Submit your tip!


By Derrick Story, Author of Digital Photography Hacks; professional photographer
06/23/2006

Filed in: Digital cameras

Level: Intermediate | 1494 out of 1536 users found this tip helpful


Unless you really have a lot of time on your hands, I doubt you want to go through the massive folder that contains your European vacation photos and rename them Europe_1.jpg, Europe_2.jpg, and so on down the line. If you're running Windows XP on your computer, you don't have to do this. Simply apply this hack to quickly apply a meaningful label to every picture in the folder.
First, open the folder and select View > Thumbnails.
Click the last picture in the folder you want to rename, hold down the Shift key, and click the first picture; this will select them all.
Right-click the first photo, and select Rename from the drop-down menu.
Windows XP will highlight the filename for the first photo, enabling you to give it a descriptive name. After you type in the name, click the white space outside of the photo and watch as Windows applies the name with a sequential number to each picture in the folder.

http://help.cnet.com/9602-12576_39-0.html?messageID=2505053&tag=tip-2505053

 

[dmslush]

Cool! That was quick and easy!

 

[meryll83]

Great tip, that's really useful!

 

[garris3404]

Very useful! Thanks!

 

[Princess19]

Oh this is great! Thanks!

 

[PoohJen]

Similarly, whenever I load pics onto my putr, I load them into a folder, such as "Disney August 06". All the pics going into that folder automatically get named the folder name plus a number. "Disney August 06 1" "2" and so on down the line.

 

[Groucho]

I just started doing this with Irfanview, as I go through my older digital photos and try to organize them by topic. The easiest way I've found is to look at the photos in the Thumbnails view, highlight the ones you want to rename, and right-click and click Rename (or just hit F2).

This takes you to the Batch Renaming screen. You can either change the name pattern listed in the lower left (default is "image###" and you can change the number of #s to fit the number of leading zeros you want), or click "Set rename options" for more options.

In there, you can do advanced things like change the starting number, change the increment, replace text, change if it copies to a new folder with a new name or just renamed them in place, etc. It also gives a little more help with the file naming - for example, you can put almost any attribute in the filename, from JPG comments to dates to image size to anything else you can think of. Including exif info - you could put your focal length in the filename if you wanted.

This can come in handy when organizing - for example, at first I was separating some photos in certain groups then decided to rename them into one larger group, but I still wanted them numbered by date. I first renamed them to "temp $T-##" which put the file's time/datestamp into the name. They were then all in order by date and I could then do another rename to the final style. You can use the EXIF tag if your datestamps aren't accurate (like if you have edited the file.)

Speaking of that, if you have edited but want to set your file time/datestamps back to the time the photo was created, use Irfanview Thumbnails to grab all the files you want to change, then to a JPG Lossless Transformation. Set the transformation to "none" and make sure "apply original EXIF date/time to new file" is checked. You can also check "optimize jpg file", it may make it a tiny bit smaller. No actual photo data is modified.

These are things that I just discovered with Irfanview in the past week or two. The program never ceases to amaze me with its functionality. It's absolutely indispensable. (I also tried using Adobe Bridge last night to see how it compares to Irfanview Thumbnails. My conclusion? "Yuck!")

 

[SplshMtn99]

I've got over 5000 pics stored on computer....& backed up.

Even though I started out with an organized method, and its been changed once or twice, I'm finding the process of locating a pic INSTANTLY to be a bit unsatisfactory.

And I wanted to start purging some of the older ones off my hard drive..but wasn't finding a great way of locating JUST the old ones & JUST certain old ones.

About 2 wks ago, I started using Photoshop Elements 5.0. The organizer has let me assign tags to my photos - or multiple tags if I want. I got all 5000 pics tagged pretty quickly...and I'm almost done assigning multiple tags to most. It has been AWESOME so far!!!!! I have so many ways now to look for a photo & find it really fast. I can use date/month/year (or any part of it) if I know it. I've been using tags that pretty much fall into who, what, where type of catergories. So, I can say, show me pics of Splash, or Splash at my parents Cape house, or Splash at parents house but just at Xmas time.

AND best part, it doesn't really care how badly all 5000 photos are named or currently organized. I didn't have to change any of that.

I've even found that tweaking my tags throught the process has been just as painless.

AND when I decide to purge off those old photos that I want to.....the thumbnail & tags will remain on my harddrive for me to see. If I actually want the full size photo file for a project, it will tell me the name of the CD I stored (purged) it to.

I think I FINALLY found a system that works for me. And it wasn't hard at all to apply it to 5000+ existing photos.

 

[barrie]

Great link Miss Missy! I added it my WDW photos site and gave you credit! Barrie

 

[miss missy]

Great link Miss Missy! I added it my WDW photos site and gave you credit! Barrie

Thanks! I love quick organization things

 

[Groucho]

About 2 wks ago, I started using Photoshop Elements 5.0. The organizer has let me assign tags to my photos - or multiple tags if I want.

I would assume that what it's doing is adding comments to the Exif/IPTC fields. Other alternatives are Adobe Bridge (part of Photoshop) or if you want something free, Irfanview (in thumbnail view) or PixVue. I think most any EXIF editing programs should do this as well.

The trick is searching them via the comments - PixVue takes care of this but I had problems installing it on my main PC.

 

[DueyDooDah]

I would assume that what it's doing is adding comments to the Exif/IPTC fields.

No, it's not. It' storing data in a database that links to the original photos. The database can get rather large as it stores a thumbnail image of the original. Mine is 60MB so far, with 9000 photos. Elements is a pretty sophisticated program. Basically it's a limited verision of Photoshop, but has more novice-friendly additions.

The only changes made to photos is when you use the editor portion of Elements. It will not touch your original RAW photos, but be careful with JPGs.

 

[Groucho]

That seems like a really silly decision by Adobe. There's not reason to not use IPTC fields except to trap you into using their product. Tagging is why IPTC exists.

Apparently you can go to the File drop-down and select "write tag info to file" but it really ought to be automatic. I can see them needing a database for thumbnails and to cache exif/iptc data for quicker searching... but shame on them for not doing it automatically.

Note that changing IPTC data does not alter the actual JPG photo at all. There are no downsides.