I’m a little worried about raving over this little trick I learned a couple of days ago. Mostly because I know some folks are going to call me stupid for not knowing about it before. So I apologize in advance to the experts, but this simple hack is going to save me so much time, and hopefully others too, that I’m not going to worry about their scorn.

If you take a lot of photos with your camera or phone and like me process them on a Windows computer, you may not realize that Windows features a superb file re-naming trick you can use to make things massively easier in terms of organization.

I have been laboriously re-naming my files for years and even installed some klunky renaming freeware to help, but nothing was really suitable. Now I don’t have to worry, because of this baked in feature of Windows. This has to rank as one of my all-time best Windows hacks ever. Why on earth did it take me so long to find out?

Check out the video below to see how it works.

For those who can’t be bothered to view the How-To video, here’s how it works.

1. Select all the photo files in the folder (or just the ones you want to rename), right mouse click on any one of them and then select Rename.

2. Enter in the new name you want…e.g. MegsTripJan13.jpg.

3. Hit the enter key and the system will then immediately fill out all the remaining files with the same name, along with an incrementing number.

Bingo, a folder full of easily identifiable files.

This is amazing if, like me, you frequently take 20 or 30 shots at a time (or even more on vacation for example) and then dump them into a folder, languishing with some really obscure DSC20293.jpg type names. Now I can dump a whole session shoot into a folder, and instantly rename all the photos to something which I can remember along with a date or whatever.

It’s absolutely genius!

I’ve tried it with both Windows 7 and Windows 8 and it works fine, but I haven’t tried Windows XP (how embarrassing if it’s been around that long and I didn’t know about it!). Anyway, hope it helps you out too.