Batch rename your digital photos so they sort chronologically

Posted on December 23, 2007 at 6:42 am

Do you have a digital camera? Don’t you hate how the photo files are named in all digital cameras? Usually something like IMG0001.jpg or DSC0001.jpg, basically very generic and useless when you’re trying to figure when these pictures were taken.

If you take lots of pictures, you might end up having a huge folder with tons of badly named photos, which are not easily viewed in chronological order. It’s even worse if you get photos from different cameras in one folder. Luckily, there’s a cool program that you can use to rename your photo files from the generic names to something a little more meaningful!

Stamp is a nifty little app that will batch rename digital photos by extracting the date/time from each photo and then adding the timestamp to the beginning of each filename. After you run the software, you will then be able to sort your photos and videos by filename to view them in true chronological order, even if they come from different cameras.

This program is also very useful when shooting both videos and photos from the same camera. For example, if you were to shoot a video and then take a picture, followed by another video and another photo, your camera would store the files like this:

However, once you download the files to your computer, they won’t show up in chronological order because Windows will sort images above videos no matter what:

Once you run Stamp on these digital photos, they will be renamed with the time stamp add to the front of the file name. This will allow the files to be sorted by date and time whether they are videos or photos:

This is really great because if you’re showing people your photos and videos in a slideshow, it’s really annoying to see all of the photos first and then the videos! Using this program, when you start a slideshow, things will follow in order of date and time, which will make things much nicer to view.

For example, if you’re photo files are sorted in order, then watching a slideshow of a birthday will be way better because a video of the person blowing out the candle will be followed by the photo taken of everyone singing, rather than seeing a photo of the person being fed cake after the photos of everyone singing. Make sense?

The program also has a bunch of options you can configure if you desire and works with all digital cameras and all photo/audio/video files. Another cool thing is that it can process files directly from the camera to your computer. It can automatically navigate folder trees also, so no need to select the photo folder on your camera card. Enjoy! Source MyDigitalLife

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