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January 12, 2009
IRFanView Batch Rename
One of my New Year's Resolutions was to get away from Canon's miserable image numbering schema. It's so obtuse that you wouldn't believe it if I told you. And, if you have two cameras, and a couple of CF memory cards, and you swap the cards back and forth while you're shooting in the field, well let's just say that the file numbering is downright ugly. It's enough to make you want to start Killing Strangers.
So, I'm toying around with IRFanView version 4.23. It works fairly well. There does appear to be a small bug though, in that it converts my ":" mask to an underscore ("_"). Not a huge deal. I can live with it.
The mask I'm currently toying with is the following:
$T(%Y_%m_%d-%H":"%M:%S)_$N
So, right now, it's renaming a file named IMG_0010.JPG to 2009_01_01-15_41_02_IMG_0010.JPG. Which is better, IMHO. I mean at least you can shoot images with two cameras and then put them in a single directory and then sort them by when they were shot. So, I've got that going for me.
Robert - What mask are you using?
Update: Mask now changed to $T(%Y_%m_%d-%H_%M_%S)_$N
Update 2: Mask now changed to $T(%y%m%d-%H%M%S)_####.jpg
So now, my filenames look like this: 090101-154008_0033.jpg
I changed it because I wanted a shorter filename so that I could view the entire filename when I'm looking at thumbnail view of images in XP. I have to have some type of counter on the end because my camera frequently takes more than 1 frame per second, which means that if I go with a strict file name based on date hours mins secs, I have duplicate filenames which is a problem obviously. So, the counter gets around that problem.
Posted by Rob Kiser on January 12, 2009 at 10:01 PM
Comments
You can't use any of the following characters in a file name: \ / ? : * " >
See File names and file name extensions: frequently asked questions and Forbidden Characters in Filenames
Posted by: Robert R. on January 13, 2009 at 6:26 AM