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Question from Marge: I’ve recently begun dabbling in photography with an eye towards going pro at some point. I have a question for you if you don’t mind.
Is there a way to rename all the files in a certain folder to a common base name?
My camera always names the pictures with the same base filename but just changes the numbers on the end. That makes it hard to know what the pictures in a folder are of without looking at the pictures.
It would be great if I could have the filenames actually represent what the pictures are of.
For example, if I were to take pictures at a birthday party for someone named Jane Doe the filenames could be renamed to something like this:
JaneDoeBirthday0001.jpg
JaneDoeBirthday0002.jpg
JaneDoeBirthday0003.jpg
etc…
Is there an easy way to do that in Windows without having to change all the filenames individually, one by one?
Rick’s answer: Jane, there are actually several ways to rename files in bulk in Windows, but they’re all a but convoluted and the results are less than great.
Luckily, there’s a fantastic free tool called Bulk Rename Utility that should do exactly what you want and a lot more.
Bulk Rename Utility makes it easy to change the filename of every file in a folder without having to go back and manually remove parentheses or other extraneous characters that Windows typically adds when files are renamed in bulk.
This is a very powerful program, but the user interface is intuitive and quite easy to use. But if you do end up needing help you’ll find it on the website.
You can download Bulk Rename Utility for free at OlderGeeks.
I hope this helps, Marge. Good luck!
Bonus tip: You said you’re just getting started with photography and you’d like to go pro at some point. You might want to check this out. (#ad)