Changing image file titles

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Edit My Images
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A friend does some voluntary archive and record research type work for a large national charity. The work involves (amongst other things) looking through old documents, many of which she photographs to review at leisure at a later date as she cannot remove them from the various libraries and archives where they are stored.

After a recent bit of reasearch, she ended up with photos of literally hundreds of documents which, when downloaded are assigned sequential numbers by her computer - hence she has a huge list of files called ABC1234.jpg or similar. She then has to spend hours (days!) renaming them so they’re called Ledger1page1 or similar so she can find them to refer back to later.

So, my question is ..... is there a simple was she can batch “rename” files, using LR, PS or any other pp software you can think of, to save her having to do this one image at a time? ie - select, say, 20 images and rename them all together so they come out as Ledger1page1, page2, page3 etc. Thanks all ..... (hope that makes sense).
 
Certainly have a batch rename in PS.
 
It can be done in Adobe Bridge, which is free to download & install.

It has fields that you can type your base text into, and choose the numbering format that comes next. But I think it always follows the original file numbering sequence, not the order that you select the files in, so your files would have to be in the right order to begin with, & fully sequential in terms of page numbering too (no gaps) for this to work.
 
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You can do it in Windows Explorer, highlight the files you want to rename, right click and Rename and edit the first one to be Ledger. It’ll then rename all the files highlighted to Ledger (1) Ledger (2) and so on
 
Too slow typing Andy beat me to it. The files have to be in the correct order though.
 
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Thanks all, that’s really useful info. I’ll pass it on to my friend. Might save her some time and effort and leave her free to use the time more productively. :):)
 
You should take a step back and find out why she is renaming the files. If it is to find the correct file, she would be better off putting all her photos into a DAM such as Lightroom and using that to manage the metadata. This can have the date, location, subject and any other Information you wish to gather.
I am pretty certain that the free version of Lightroom will do this.

Edit
She could also create a collection called ledger1, sort the photos in Lightroom, the could automatically create the correct file names on export.
 
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@Withers


Flexible Renamer is freeware. You can do all kinds of renaming with it as there are loads of options to choose. I use it all the time and often rename thousands of files in tens or even hundreds of directories, it will search for files matching only certain criteria, all files, manually selected files only, the list goes on. You can get it to rename directories as well. You can select a single directory, include subdirectories, whole drive.

I've tried windows explorer, extremely simple and very limited as you can't drill down to subdirectories, Looked at bridge but can't see the bulk rename option.
 
@Withers


Flexible Renamer is freeware. You can do all kinds of renaming with it as there are loads of options to choose. I use it all the time and often rename thousands of files in tens or even hundreds of directories, it will search for files matching only certain criteria, all files, manually selected files only, the list goes on. You can get it to rename directories as well. You can select a single directory, include subdirectories, whole drive.

I've tried windows explorer, extremely simple and very limited as you can't drill down to subdirectories, Looked at bridge but can't see the bulk rename option.

Another option I’d never heard of. Thanks again, will pass this on too.
 
Another option I’d never heard of. Thanks again, will pass this on too.

Withers, may i ask why is your friend renaming the files?

Edited for spelling...
 
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Another option I’d never heard of. Thanks again, will pass this on too.

I assume she knows which photos belong to which ledger. With Flexible Renamer you can select images ABC 12345 to ABC 13345 and set it to name them 'Ledger 1 - Page ' and have it add a sequential number at the end starting at whatever page number you want (with or without leading zeros) so you end up with 'Ledger 1 page 00001' to 'Ledger 1 Page 00100'.

Another option is a little freeware routine called Cute PDF which, once installed, adds the utility as a 'printer' and you select print to Cute PDF and it will save the printed output as a PDF file. Then all your LEDGER 1 files can be combined in to 1 multi page PDF document, I use Wondershare's PDF Elements but there are other programs. It would take some time but IMHO 100 20 page PDFs would be more usable than 2,000 JPGs.
 
Withers, may i ask why is your firmed renaming the files?

She did say these files were photographed to work on at a later date/different location and the camera name of something like ABC 12345 wasn't helpful when referring back to them.
 
She did say these files were photographed to work on at a later date/different location and the camera name of something like ABC 12345 wasn't helpful when referring back to them.
So does that mean that the files are being renamed as a means of finding the correct photograph?
If so, I don't know many experienced photographers that would advocate using the file system as a means of tracking and finding photographs, that is what a DAM is for.
 
So does that mean that the files are being renamed as a means of finding the correct photograph?
If so, I don't know many experienced photographers that would advocate using the file system as a means of tracking and finding photographs, that is what a DAM is for.
It seems that the images are of documents for example it could be an old manual with 50 pages, photocopying not an option and to write out too time consuming. one photo per page mean 100 photos for the one document. There could be 20 documents each with 100 pages so a total of 2,000 images. To find the information contained in the images the camera assigned names of ABC 12345 are meaningless with regard to content. This is how I understand what she wants. Using OCR to create a document from the images or printing to PDF would, IMHO, be a better option than storing as images as you could then load the 100 images from each document in to 1 and end up with 20 documents.

So while they are photos they are of a page in a document rather than a photo as we know it.
 
Not sure how well OCR would work on old, handwritten documents even if the spelling's reasonably good.
 
Not sure how well OCR would work on old, handwritten documents even if the spelling's reasonably good.
Not seen where she mentioned handwritten but if they are then OCR is probably out. I still think 'Print to PDF' and then combine images from one document in to 1 multi-page PDF is the way to go, at least that's how I would do it. See comment #16
 
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Withers, may i ask why is your friend renaming the files?

Edited for spelling...
Yes ... she is doing it so she can find them more easily - so she can go straight to an image called date_book1_page1 or whatever. She will take several images of one piece of work, then move on to the next. I have no idea if she has set up a folder system - which would be an obvious place to start. She's an archivist first and photographer second, so not sure if she's fully up to speed with easier methods of keeping track of her images. I'll try to help her out if I can.
 
Not seen where she mentioned handwritten but if they are then OCR is probably out. I still think 'Print to PDF' and then combine images from one document in to 1 multi-page PDF is the way to go, at least that's how I would do it. See comment #16

Ref this and your previous post, which explained the issue perfectly, thank you. .... the documents are all hand written ledgers, work records, staff records, letters and the like: some quiet faded and difficult to read.
 
Not seen where she mentioned handwritten but if they are then OCR is probably out.

Lucky guess! The OP mentioned old documents and they tend to be handwritten.

Hopefully the archivist in question has an organized way of working (IME they usually have) so will have a decent file/folder structure. Renaming the files should be (relatively) easy but sorting out a mass of disorganized photos could be less so - good luck to the lady doing the work.
 
Yes ... she is doing it so she can find them more easily - so she can go straight to an image called date_book1_page1 or whatever. She will take several images of one piece of work, then move on to the next. I have no idea if she has set up a folder system - which would be an obvious place to start. She's an archivist first and photographer second, so not sure if she's fully up to speed with easier methods of keeping track of her images. I'll try to help her out if I can.
Julianne Krost has some good tutorials on lightroom, some relevant ones below:


 
Hopefully you can convince your firmed that managing the files via the file system is not a very efficient way. Using a DAM is so much quicker and more efficient - and you can use the free Lightroom version for this, no need to spend the monthly fee.
 
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