Sorrentino's Notes (09/12)
Snipit: A Useful Utility
by Phil Sorrentino
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Utilities are usually small programs that are intended to
do a
specific task or a small range of tasks. These tasks are usually
designed to help manage and/or tune the computer hardware, Operating System
(OS), or a particular software application. Most of these utilities are
free. A good source of these utilities can be found in the SPCUG Monitor
Computer Buffet. This regular column in the Monitor discusses and describes
sometimes over 30 different free software offerings along with a website
from where you can download the software. (Much of this software has been
tried by the Monitor Editor or SPCUG members, but occasionally one has not,
so be careful in trying something that no one else has ever tried. You might
want to ask around before you download something that seems too good to be
true. Keep in mind that when you download something from the internet, you
could get something you were not expecting. Always be extra careful.)
If you have a digital camera and move the digital images
from the camera to your computer, fairly regularly, you might have need for
a "utility" that allows you to "in bulk" change the names of images from the
names the camera gives to the images, i.e. IMG_5051… or P0705090123.
Actually, in the simple case, this can be accomplished with Windows
Explorer. Windows Explorer will let you select a list of images (files) and
then if you right-click on the selection and then choose Rename, and then
rename the first one in the list, all the following will have the same name,
followed by a sequential number in parentheses. This can be very useful, but
it doesn’t give you all the flexibility you might want.
Third-party utilities to the rescue. There are many free
utilities that are available for Windows XP and Vista that will allow you to
change the names of groups of files. Two of these utilities are CKRename,
Bulkrenameutility. Each of these gives you a variety of ways to change the
existing filenames (the existing filenames must be sequential for this to be
useful). CKRename options are shown below:
You might want to Insert characters before or after the
existing name.
Or you might want to auto-number the set of files with
the number before or after the existing name. You might even want to change
the case of the alpha characters in the existing name. And you might want to
do my favorite, substitute one string of characters for another string. I
use this feature to make all of my images have file names start with a date.
To accomplish this, I substitute for the first character or few characters,
the date I took the images. For example if I have a set of images that are
named IMG_5051…IMG_5096, I would use the string substitution to replace
"IMG_" with "2009-08-15-" which will produce a set of images that are named
2009-08-15-5051…2009-08-15-5096. With the date as part of the file name, and
my picture file chronologically organized, I can guarantee that I will be
able to find the images when I look for them in the future. There are many
ways to organize your photos, but unless you want to end up with the
computer equivalent of a shoe box full of un-named, un-dated photos, you
have to establish a method and then stick to it, religiously. "By date" is
just one picture filing method you can use, "save by events" is another,
maybe more popular, method. Any method that makes sense to you is a good
method. Just pick a method and then stick to it. A bulk renaming utility can
help you specify the names of all of the photos and possibly scans that you
will want to include in your "Pictures" file using your file naming method.
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Copyright 2009. This article is from the December 2009 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL
34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit
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