Batch Renaming Photographs Using Adobe Bridge
The new school year is upon us. The year will bring new students, new experiences, and new memories. Of course you will want to preserve your memories using a digital camera.
The way digital cameras name photographs has always bugged me. DC45000.jpg offers little clue to what event was being photographed. Renaming the photo to something like soccer-001.jpg offers a more descriptive name that will also prove more helpful down the road when you want to find the photos. Of course you can use the camera to set up the file name, but have your tried navigating your camera’s preferences to do this? What a pain!
I often take multiple pictures of a single event (say…a soccer game) and the Adobe Bridge helps me easily and quickly batch rename the files.
Here’s how:
1. Open Adobe Bridge
2. Navigate to the folder that contains the images that you wish to batch rename
3. You can select all of the images (Edit > Select All) or you can be more selective by Ctrl + Clicking (CMD + Click -Mac) on specific images.
4. After you select the images that you want to include in the batch rename select Tools > Batch Rename. You can also right click (CMD + Click) on any of the selected files and choose Batch Rename.
5. The Batch Rename dialogue box will open.
6. Select your Destination Folder. I almost always use the Rename in same folder option.
7. Create a filename. I like to use a text field followed by either a date or sequenced number (or both). You can add or subtract filename choices by clicking the plus or minus buttons. Look at the bottom of the dialogue for an example of how the new filename will look.
8. The following example will create a file name that looks something like this: July_4th_2006_001.jpg
9. Don’t worry about the Options section of the dialogue. I have never had to use any of these options.
10. Click the Rename button.
11. Done! That was easy. Now…get to renaming.