Batch Rename Images Using Adobe Bridge

Naming your images on import is good practice but there’s times when you’d like to rename a batch of images after import, maybe you’ve whittled down the images and would like them to be sequentially numbered or, and I admit this happens far too frequently, your images are named ‘Enter custom name here’.

The examples in this post come from a set of wedding photographs at Fotolia

Select The Images

Like most applications Adobe Bridge uses a couple of keyboard commands, known as modifiers, to select individual or a range of images. To select individual images press the Ctrl (PC) or Cmd (Mac) key as you click the images you want;

To select a range of images, click on the first image and then press Shift and click on the last image;

To select all the images press Ctrl+a (PC) or Cmd+a (Mac).

Rename The Images

If you’re a keyboard shortcut fan, and I know I am, then pressing Shift+Ctrl+r (PC) or Shift+Cmd+r (mac) will open up the Rename dialogue box, if you like your menus then head up to the Tools menu;

For this post we’ll just look at renaming the images in the folder. In a future post we’ll look at presets and folder destination.

In this example you can see I’m going to rename the images with some text (1) and a sequential number (3)

If there’s only one option here I could click the + button to the right (2) and choose the type of input to add to the filename. There’s a lot of options here and your workflow may benefit from 3 or more labels.

For this example I’ll just use the basic name and number however. You can see that I can choose how many digits my filename should have, I chose two and to start the count at 1, but I could just as easily started at any number I wanted if I’d already batched images previously.

At the bottom of the dialogue box there’s a handy example of what the filename used to look like and what it will look like now (5).

You may notice that at the end of the filename I added an underscore (_). This helps me distinguish the file name and number.

Finally, click ‘Rename’ and quick as a flash the images are renamed.

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Filed under: Adobe, Software, Technique & Tutorials Tagged: Adobe, Adobe Bridge, batch, batch rename, Bridge, Eric Renno, TipSquirrel