Renaming & sorting both video clips & stills to date taken

[Bob Peterson]

Yea, that is precisely what happens which I think is what Paul wanted. Every camera that I’ve seen, both stills and video, provide very little information in a file name. It may be a name plus clip 1, clip 2, etc., or a meaningless number. So, my suggestion is to give a group of images a meaningful name like place and/or date plus a sequence number which preserves the original sequence of the images.

I don’t know why that merits a “Beware”.

[John Rofrano]

[Bob Peterson] ” So, my suggestion is to give a group of images a meaningful name like place and/or date plus a sequence number which preserves the original sequence of the images.”

+1

Not only that… but a year later when you go to make a photo montage of several events and you find that each folder has the same file names because the camera resets to IMG0001 every time you empty the camera card… or you used several cameras that use the same filename, you will be happy that you renamed all of your pictures “Event_Name-0001”. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Wayne Waag]

[Bob]

I don’t know why that merits a “Beware”.

The “beware” was from a previous post about using Windows Explorer for renaming.

Then right click on the first file you want to rename, change the name, and Windows will automatically add a “(1)” at the end, and will number the rest in order.

Beware. The problem with this approach is that you lose all the file names.

wwaag

[John Rofrano]

[Wayne Waag] “Beware. The problem with this approach is that you lose all the file names.”

I’m just as confused as Bob. Isn’t the whole purpose of renaming files to “loose the file name” in favor of a new one?

What this doesn’t do is allow the files to be sorted because it doesn’t pad the numbers so File(1), File(2), etc. will only work for 9 files because when you have 10 they will sort File(1), File(10), File (2), alphabetically. You really need a rename program to do this correctly. I use Bulk Rename Utility on Windows. On the Mac this is built into the OS X Finder so you don’t need any external problem.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Wayne Waag]

[John Rofrano]

I’m just as confused as Bob. Isn’t the whole purpose of renaming files to “loose the file name” in favor of a new one?

Not necessarily, you may want to simply add an index based upon however you want the files sorted while retaining the base name. The next sentence from my post was:

If you want to rename with an index number, use something like Renamer, where you can sort according to date or whatever, and then add an index number as either or prefix or suffix, so that the base name for each file remains unchanged.

In this manner, you can always “rename” the files once again, deleting the index, and you end up with the original name which at least for a particular camera is (usually) a unique number. I believe this is exactly why you are recommending use of the Bulk Rename Utility. Bottom line is that I think we are all on the same page.

wwaag

[John Rofrano]

Sorry I missed that part. So if the names are all different and you want to keep them and just add a number, that wouldn’t work. I get it. Yea, we’re both saying the same thing about using a rename utility.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Bob Peterson]

It gets worse John. Let’s suppose you begin reorganizing your shots so they are more logically grouped. It’s probably impossible to detect duplicate names in a series of directories, so, when you move images from directory A and B to C, image IMG0001 on directory A and image IMG0001 on directory B both get moved to directory C. Ouch! Fortunately, Windows has now gotten smart enough to tell you there is a collision, but there was a time when it did not. I’m sure I lost images that way. Even so, it is still a mess because now you can’t move the images unless you first rename the offenders.

[Bob Peterson]

Sorry, but that still does not rise to the level of “BEWARE”. Come on! Have you ever heard the acronym KIS? I was tempted, but I resisted the second “S”. 😉

BTW, if the files have already been renamed, the original question is moot.

[Wayne Waag]

[Bob Peterson]

Sorry, but that still does not rise to the level of “BEWARE”. Come on! Have you ever heard the acronym KIS? I was tempted, but I resisted the second “S”. 😉

Bob, there’s absolutely no need to be insulting over use of the word “beware” on this forum. We all post things that others disagree with–that’s the nature of free interchange. We’ve all posted things that turned out to be absolutely wrong. Enough said.

wwaag