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Rename photos based on thumbnail order #

How to arrange a group of thumbnails and rename them sequentially based on their position:
  1. Navigate to folder containing photos in Windows Explorer
  2. View > Thumbnails
  3. Click and drag thumbnails into desired order. It may be advisable to enable View > Arrange Icons by > Align to Grid.
  4. Edit > Select All
  5. Right click on first photo and rename to desired_name (1). That is, the desired file name, followed by a space, followed by an open parentheses, followed by the number one, followed by a close parentheses.
  6. All photos will be renamed to desired_name (#), where # corresponds to the photo's position in the thumbnail layout.
At this point, our filenames look something like: name (1), name (2), name (3)... (if Windows Explorer does not list files in proper numerical order (e.g., "10" follows "1" instead of "9"), you can correct this with TweakUI: Explorer > check "Use intuitive filename sorting"). To get rid of the parentheses and renumber the files with leading zeroes:
  1. Launch ReNamer
  2. Settings > General > check "Use natural order sorting algorithm..." > Save (you may need to restart the program for this to take effect)
  3. Add Folder
  4. Add rule > Serialize > check "Incremental" > check "Pad with zeroes to reach length" > insert 3 for the number of zeroes > click "Add Rule"
  5. Add rule > CleanUp > check "(...)" to the right of "Strip out content of brackets:" > click "Add Rule"
  6. Review results before committing changes. The new filenames should look something like: 001name, 002name, 003name ...
Two other possible (though untested) methods using commercial software: with IMatch and Photoshop Elements.

/windows | Sep 10, 2009

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