Lessons

Lesson Info

Renaming Files

Now let's talk a little bit about renaming files okay so hopefully everybody's got this uriel by now it's pretty easy one to remember anyway so we'll close this photoshopped document in this one cause stays on that photo shop it's bad bridge okay let's come back over to our wonderful colorful file of malley flowers now I really did use creative or meaningful names when I imported these photos but let's say you didn't ok so in bridge of course you could click toe activate the file name part of the file and it highlights and you could simply type in something else right here now he you know whatever you would like let's say two thousand ten maybe where you shot the file whatever's meaning meaningful for you when you're renaming a file if you are goingto go ahead and rename subsequent files in the same folder don't even remove your hand from the keyboard just hit the tab key and bridge highlights the next name you don't have to click within the name it's already highlighted it is ready fo...

r you start typing ok so if I wanted to come over here and name this one something a bit more descriptive I might type er bird of paradise right now what just happened when I pressed tab to go to the next file bridge reorganize them according to my current sort order which makes things jump around a bit which is a little weird are difficult when you're oppressing the tap here to go through in rename a bunch of files right? So to keep that from happening what you can do is come up here to the sort menu to kind of sorts the top toward the top right of the interface and you're going to choose manually that way when you're going through and renaming these files they don't jump around because they're changing alphabetic order right? This kind of thing is really handy for stock art casey ellis we're over here in our stock art folder so I could come to this image right here and I could come up with some kind of a scheme that is easy for me to type in and remember so that I'm marking these images according to kind of what they are or I could you keep worrying so you could type in male hula k nine and so on and so forth so that whole tab to rename thing can be very handy and again to keep them from jumping around in alphabetical order as your renaming just make sure you turn on sort manually okay now let's go back to our folder full of maui flowers and we'll go ahead and let it sort by founding again so now let's say that you wanna rename a slew of files not individual file names per image so what we're going to do is click to activate the folder and then you're going to select the images for some reason battery name will not automatically select images inside of a folder so not only do you have to click to activate the folder for that images live then you have to select all or select the images within that folder that you actually want to remain. So do you remember that once you have a selection of images or they're activated rather then you can do a couple of different things you can choose tools battery name to open the dialogue or you can press shift command are on a map or a shift command shift control are on the p c r for rename so here's the bat tree name dialog box it's big honking thing all kinds of different things you can do in here you can tell bridge where to put the renamed files you can keep him in the same folder or you can have bridge move them elsewhere as well as copy them elsewhere. This kind of thing can be handy let's say if you've got a certain model that you work with as a photographer you might want tio rename certain photos of that specific model and you might want to move those specific files of that model out into another place on your hard drive you could do all that right here within the battery name dialog box so we're going to say we'll just leave these in the same folder and then we can come down here to the new file name section and that's where you can tell bridge exactly how you want these files renamed can it will add sequential numbering for you so that you don't have any overwrite situation which would be really bad. So here we can type in anything we want, and we've got this handy poppet menu and this lets you type in your own text. Or you can choose to do the renaming that involves maybe the current file name, but she won't attack on let's say a date or a shoot location or a client name. You can add a sequence number, you can add the date and time you could add information from metadata holder name all kinds of things so let's, go ahead and say we want these to be named mallory from this next field, you can choose to add a date in several different formats, ok, but I don't like doing that mainly because it makes my images a little long and the way I should I don't care what day I took it on. I don't care what month I took it in. I mainly care about the year best in my own work flow. If you're doing a lot of portrait sittings and wedding sheets and all that kind of stuff date could be, you know, a whole lot more important to you than it is to me, but basically if you don't like any of these date presets and there's a slew of them so we've got date and time and then when she choose date in time, you can choose a date created or datemodified or don't want to add today's date to the file or yesterday state to the file and then now that you specify what kind of day you want to add what form it would you like that date to be, which he like left a year, year, month day damon here four digit year teaches a year and so on and so forth but if none of those suit you go ahead and delete that field, add another text line of criteria there and then type in the date however you want it to be okay if you just want you know what is this month it is eleven twelve anything you want okay, so you're not stuck with those bridge date formats and then of course, if you want a sequential number to be added on let's, say if we want all the photos in this folder to be named with malley plus the month and year with a dash in between and then bridge will add a sequence number on the end of that, and you can tell it how big you want that sequence number two b ok, depending upon how many photos your renaming at the time, if I'm renaming thousands of photos, you know that I better have more than one digit here. And the best thing about all of this is at the very bottom of that dialogue box. You get a preview of what the new name is going to be in what the current name is. Ok, so currently the first file that I've got activated in here was called bird of paradise because we just renamed it a few minutes ago. Well, this has shown me that the new file name is now going to be malley eleven dash twelve and then a four digit sequential number so I could change that teo teaches and cia's, you make changes appear it reflects down here. So if I wanted to put some kind of a space in between, you know, my text malli in the month, then I could just come up here to this text field where we've got that information, I keep right clicking on that mouse, and they're springing up all those contextual menus I could maybe put an underscore, or I could put another dash or whatever I wanted okay, so it shows you what the new finding file name will be. This is important because you cannot undo about trey name. You cannot. There is no way to do it. Okay, so that's, why? It's very important to make sure you've got it all set up exactly like he wanted here. And do be sure to note how many files are going to be processed because you may have more files active in bridge than you realize that you do. So do you pay close attention to this information at the bottom the dialog box to make sure you get it right because there ain't no and doing it. Ok, so now let's, go ahead and say rename and that's it that's how fast it renamed two hundred and forty seven files, not bad. And of course my sore order is different now, because the file names are different and I still have appear in my sort, many of the very top kind of toward the right hand side of the workspace I'm still sorting by finally and so that's why the images are a little bit different now any questions on renaming files individually or bad tree naming, they're always always questioned way, all right, we don't have any in the room. We've got one here from a net ingenuity wondering when should descriptive text to be in the file name versus in the metadata or both I think you'd want marketing key words in the file names for ceo yes that's a very good point so s e o stands for search engine optimization okay? And when people are searching on the internet for keywords file names is one of the first things that will come up they rank very high in google's ranking of important things to look at one of the places that google looks for your search engine rankings if you've got let's say ah website um best dedicated to malle flowers right photography what have you and you've got malley flowers in your html page names or you've got mallory flowers in your domain name and then google is also going to look at when it's indexing your side to see if malley flowers appears in the content of that web page because people will assign keywords to files they don't have anything to do with that particular topic let's say you know a photo of an orange I could put a key word in their business and that would be, you know bad so google checks a lot of different places in let's say a web site to make sure that its ranking in indexing your site appropriately and that the content that you say is there is really there all right, so filings are very, very important so yeah, if you are concerned about people finding photos were finding this kind of information that you definitely put a magic key word in the file name that would be better for search into rankings than adding key words but for the kind of stuff that we're talking about in today's class it just depends on how you want to search you know, do you want to search mainly using this field up here, then you need to stick with final names and key words you know, do you mainly want to do your searches with the find command? Then you can start adding stuff into metadata that way I realised keywords are actually part of metadata, but whereas bridge is concerned, it kind of separates him out a little bit because you can't search for any meta data appear in this search field, so it just depends right? One more question from tech rob if a file that is currently linked to in design is renamed will bridge changed the indesign links automatically or will the designer have to re link? Okay, let me see if I understand it question if we are renaming fouls within bridge and we change a file name that is linked inside of an indesign document, if we change that file name in bridge, then when you open in design in his I'll go who I can't find my files, but it will give you a little dialogue box that lets you fix those links. So renaming the main bridge is not goingto do anything to let in design. Know that you've rename those files. Thank you.