This may be old hat to some, but this product just saved me days worth of work! And I suspect I’m not the first person this problem has happened to…

This weekend, I was bemoaning to a friend of mine about the roughly 4000 digital assets I needed to go through and change their filenames for. See, In The Beginning, we had many different naming conventions to our digital images, conventions which have now been finalized according to appropriate file-naming standards. Unfortunately, before I finalized the naming conventions, I had “some system” which was consistent, but might not work with some UNIX or Mac machines (in my own defense, it’s hard to say, and they probably would work, but I realized later that I didn’t want to take any chances). Between the old files and the new ones I created, we had roughly 6000 files which needed renaming. Oops.

So in the midst of other projects, and when I needed something relatively mindless to do, I would replace the weird characters with the correct convention (ex. 75.183.27a-b (1).jpg to 75-183-27a-b_1.jpg). This is incredibly time-consuming, but necessary.

WELL! My friend kindly pointed out a small freeware program which replaces those pesky periods into dashes for me (and leaving the file extensions intact!). It appears that the program, ReNamer, can also embed metadata keytags into a batch of files as well. I’ll have to play around with this, seeing that Adobe Bridge keeps cutting short longer metadata information (like the Creative Commons copyright notice I embed).

The program is fast and it took me only about 5 minutes to figure out how to use (it would have taken less time had I not overlooked the giant “Click Here” part of the program). After some testing, my files open ok and my hand is not screaming from the repetitive Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V action.

The creator, den4b’s website, with forums and documentation is here

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