Rename Your Digital Photos In Bulk

I love taking digital photos and recently I went on a mini vacation to Portland, Oregon with a road trip to Seattle, Washington and of course I took a ton of pictures.

Now that I’m finally settled back at home, I’ve been going through the hundreds and I do mean hundreds of photos that I took while on my trip, which at some point will end up in a nice online gallery on my site.

As I’ve been going through all these wonderful pictures, I started realizing it was going to take forever to rename all of my pictures from pict0123.jpg to something a little more useful, so what did I do? I did a little research and found a really good solution that works under Windows XP.

  1. Open the folder and select View > Thumbnails.
  2. Click the last picture in the folder you want to rename, hold down the Shift key and click the first picture; this will select them all.
  3. Right-click the first photo and select Rename from the drop-down menu.
  4. Windows XP will highlight the filename for the first photo, enabling you to give it a descriptive name.
  5. After you type in the name, click the white space outside of the photo and watch as Windows applies the name with a sequential number to each picture in the folder.

There you go. Five easy steps to renaming hundreds if not thousands of digital photos in record time. This might not be new to you but it was a huge time saver for me.

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6 Comments

  1. Frits
    August 31, 2006 at 11:24 am

    yes, that works alright.

    But where did you buy your camera. I got mine with free software for standard editing of photos including advanced facilities for renaming, changing extension, etc.

  2. Sean
    August 31, 2006 at 2:41 pm

    Hi Fritz. My camera came with software and I also have Adobe Photoshop as well but this technique works really fast which is what I wanted.

  3. TechZ
    September 1, 2006 at 2:48 am

    There’s a program called “THERename” I use, allows for more control over renaming, I used to use the way you mentioned before though.

  4. Sean
    September 1, 2006 at 9:29 am

    Hey TechZ. I’ve never heard of the program you mention. I’ll look into it as I’m always interested in new programs to help with my daily work. Thank you for the heads up.

  5. Lady.Wolf
    September 1, 2006 at 8:12 pm

    What a wonderful tip to run across for those of us that are ‘low-techie’. I’m sure I’ll be using it…a LOT. Thanks!

  6. Sean
    September 1, 2006 at 9:22 pm

    Hi Lady Wolf. Glad to have helped you out. By the way, how did you come to find my site? I’m always curious to know.

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