Narrowband.org

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).