Image Renaming

Anyone with a digital camera knows that the file names that are automatically assigned to your images are often jumbles of letters and numbers that don't tell you anything about the images themselves. For that reason, file-renaming tools have become pretty popular; they let users rename batches of images using words or dates that give meaning to the file names. Unfortunately, Image Renaming is one of the less elegant tools for this task that we've encountered. It works, but it's not particularly intuitive.

The program's interface is less than welcoming, consisting of a blank gray screen that's split up into four empty rectangles and a series of menus across the top. We started at the file menu, and were able to select the images that we wanted to work with; users can also drag and drop images onto the interface, which is handy. Once we'd selected our images, we moved on to the Action menu, which gave us the options to modify image content or modify image names. The former is actually a useful watermarking feature, which lets users insert the file name, date, or custom text onto the image itself. An Options menu let us customize the custom text, as well as the file name format, the date order, and other parameters. The actual renaming feature let us rename files with dates or the index name, or append the date or index name to the existing file names. An online Help file provided a fairly thorough overview of the program's features. Overall, Image Renaming worked just fine, but the interface is less-than-user friendly and will be unappealing to anyone who is new to this sort of program or who appreciates good design.

Image Renaming comes as a ZIP file and is accessible after extraction with no need for installation.