Digital Photography Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools

What do you do when you have a whole folder full of vacation photos with weird, camera-generated filenames that don't make sense? This simple Windows XP hack will give them all more meaningful names .

Unless you really have a lot of time on your hands, I doubt you want to go through the massive folder that contains your European vacation photos and rename them Europe_1.jpg , Europe_2.jpg , and so on down the line. If you're running Windows XP on your computer, you don't have to do this. Simply apply this hack to quickly apply a meaningful label to every picture in the folder.

First, open the folder and select View Thumbnails. Click on the last picture in the folder you want to rename, hold down the Shift key, and click on the first picture; this will select them all.

Right-click on the first photo and select Rename from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 8-35.

Windows XP will highlight the filename for the first photo, enabling you to give it a descriptive name. After you type in the name, click on the white space outside of the photo and watch as Windows applies the name with a sequential number to each picture in the folder, as shown in Figure 8-36.

This is a quick way to manage all of those photo filenames that seem to multiply on your computer's hard drive. To learn more tricks for organizing these files, see [Hack #49] .