Comments 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.
Has anyone any ideas please? I did all of the above but the majority of my files although renamed in Bridge, all disappeared, showing grey thumbnails with exec on them. In a list they show as UNIX executable file. Where I went wrong, I think is that I had a mix of CR2 and Tiff files in the batch and none were given a CR or Tiff extension. The first six CR images show as thumbnails although they are horizontal instead of vertical at which point it got indigestion and the remaining thumbnails are grey except for the new names. The four Tiff files are fine. Happily I have the originals backed up, but I would like to know where I went wrong and whether I can get the exec ones back again. Thanks VL
That just happened to me on my PC. I had to create a Restore point and luckily retrieved all of the photos from a previous state.
LOL! I lost all my pictures too! Don’t try this at home!
I think I figured it out. This same problem was happening to me until I went back in and put a period at the end of the new file name. When you include the period, you can see below in the preview section of the Batch Rename window that Bridge includes the CR2/Tiff/JPG extension at the end, where before it was leaving it off. This worked for me, I hope it works for you too. Good Luck!
LH – you got it right! Although, I couldn’t batch rename them bc I had to put the . and JPG at the end of each name. A little work to save my photos!
I tested and I believe the reason for this issue is because I used numbers with periods separating the dates (01.24.2011) rather than using 01242011 or jan242011 as the name. It must have triggered some kind of UNIX file extention…
I hope this solves the mystery for all who thought their photos were lost!