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We kicked-start the year with our new baby - it has four wheels and was codenamed ‘flying Myvi’. We took delivery of the car in the first week of January, after having waited for *drumrolls, please…* … more than seven months (a record). It was also the year I celebrated my 2nd singlehood anniversary (going on 3rd pretty soon). I can’t believe it’s been so long, as everything still appears fresh in my mind. It seems like only yesterday we went out for our first date.

Then I was introduced to Toastmasters by some friends. Before long, I signed up to be a member and have since spoken 7 times, not including impromptu speeches (some of which were terrible!). Participated in a contest once. Made a complete fool out of myself on stage. I wish I didn’t remember this. I vowed to go on a hiatus and concentrate instead on my university projects. Things are looking much better now though, and I hope to finish my 10th speech by February next year.

My three-week semester break was a memorable one. The Spirit of KL competition saw hundreds of teams made up of mostly foundation, first and second year students. We were among the older ones there (final year, at that!). Made many new friends and had lots of fun. And the fact that we took home the grand prize of RM10K plus handphones and vouchers simply made it all the sweeter.
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I sometimes do alot of image processing and one of the problems I encountered was changing multiple filenames quickly. It’s fine if you have 5, 10 or even 20 files but what about more than a thousand?

Sure, we could leave the filenames alone but sometimes there are photos that turn out bad and you’d just want to remove them. When that happens, the filenames inside that folder are no longer in a ‘perfect’ numbering order.

The usual method of using “F2″ in Windows XP is not feasible either, because it introduces spaces and brackets (picture.jpg, picture (1).jpg, picture (2).jpg) which are not internet-friendly. Spaces will be converted to “%20″ and the ( ) brackets will be converted to “%28″ and “%29″ respectively. This means that ‘picture (1).jpg‘ will become ‘picture%20%281%29.jpg‘, which is very messy if you asked me.

I want to have my filenames appear like ‘pic01.jpg‘, ‘pic02.jpg‘, etc. This utility helps you to do exactly just that. You can remove and/or add characters to your filenames as you like. In this example, I have removed the first two characters (letters “I” and “M”), and added a prefix ‘pizza’. You can also replace a string - it’ll produce the same result. For example, replacing the string ‘IMGP’ with ‘pizza’ will result in ‘pizza6236.JPG‘, ‘pizza6237.JPG‘, etc. Next, comes the most important part - numbering.

In this example, I chose put the numbers behind so I selected ‘Suffix’. If you’d like the sequence to increase by more than 1, just change the ‘Incr.’ (increment) value. Usually, that won’t be necessary for most use. If you have more than 9 files, you’d probably want to add some ‘padding’.

A padding of ‘3′ should be used if you have more than 99 files. ‘Padding’ simply inserts zeros in front of your digits for proper sorting. In this example, I’ve used only a fraction of the features included in the program. It’s capable of doing much more, actually (the interface is laden with buttons!).

Once all the settings have been done, simply click ‘Rename’ and your filenames will be renamed accordingly - within a blink of an eye. I renamed more than 1000 files and it took less than 2 seconds. Version 2.4.1.0 (latest, released last month) can be downloaded for free at the BRU downloads page (~650Kb).