Having a small child I take a lot of pictures and I do not download them to my computer very frequently. That makes sorting and filing pictures a chore that takes quite a bit of time. I also try to be organized by filing pictures into appropriate folders and giving them meaningful names (I will have a separate post on my current “digital pictures workflow” and tools I use).

Not satisfied with limitations of Windows XP built-in rename functionality, I started searching for a utility that will help me with that task. After trying 4-5 different programs (commercial and free), I purchased the following tool: Better File Rename (v5).

BFR (Better File Rename) has a few nice options:

• Context menu integration which you can invoke on set of files or a folder
• Extensive list of built-in actions
• You can also drag and drop files into it once it is open
• “Droplet” support — see below for screenshot explaining what it does

A few notes:

• The easiest UI/richest set of built-in actions of all the tools I’ve tested
• Took me a minute to find “produce numbered list” — that’s probably the most frequent action I will use when filing my pictures
• Only $20/user — on any number of computers. This is important for me because I have a laptop, desktop and sometimes do this on my wife’s laptop
• Take a look at this page if you are interested in other tools. It also provides links that explain how to perform renames in tools you already use (Photoshop, IrfanView, etc): http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/renamers/Batch_Rename_Picture_Files_Tools_Tips.htm

Here is what UI looks like:

1. I really liked the fact that I can “layer” my actions by performing multiple actions in a row
2. There is a very impressive set of “actions” (everything from “produce numbered list” to “insert”, “replace”, “regular expressions” and many more)
3. For every action you have a number of options that are configurable
4. Preview of what the new name will look like

Here is what I would like to see in the next version:

• Preview support for images
• Improvements to “manual rename” — specify prefix, suffix and then allow me to manually rename each file. This only makes sense if preview support for images is implemented
• There is “droplet” functionality, but I would like to be able to load droplet into BFR as preset
• Ability to update EXIF/IPTC info for images

Here is the full list of actions:

Droplet description:

Let me know what tools you use for your file renaming/image processing needs.