Yesterday I ran into a problem. I had 1049 images in about 15 different folders. All of the images had the same naming convention which was 01.jpg, 02.jpg, 03.jpg. I needed to move all of these images into one folder. Well when I tried standard dragging and dropping, that wouldn't work because the images had the same naming convention and would overwrite eachother. I wasn't going to rename 1049 images manually, so I needed to find a software solution - and I did find it!

Freeware: Bulk Rename Utility by Jim Willsher

I discovered this gem of a program through PC World. PC World is a great place to find good downloads. I actually turned to PC World after Download.com failed to yield any good free software for what I needed to do.

Bulk Rename Utility is a really light-weight program, weighing in at only 596KB. It is completely freeware and also has an uninstall utility in Add/Remove Programs. I am using it on Windows XP Pro, so I don't really have any idea how it runs on Vista. But for what I need to do, it is great. The program is very powerful. It has a huge amount of options, but they are presented in a way that is not overwhelming. I was able to figure out how to do what I needed in about five minutes. With about another 15 minutes of tinkering, I've discovered a lot more useful stuff. Here are just some of the things I have used Bulk Rename Utility for:

Adding a suffix to images
Changing capital .JPG extensions to lowercase .jpg extensions
Completely removing filenames and changing them to numbers
Automatically moving images to new folders upon rename completion

This tool can be used for so much more. If you need to work with filenames or moving a large amount of files, Bulk Rename Utility is the way to go. It is perfect for people who work with a ton of photos or graphics. It is very stable and comes with a ton of functionality. It will save your hours and hours of time over doing the work manually. Try it out and I am sure you'll love it!

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