Rename Photos Based on EXIF Data

Classifying and organizing digital pictures often involves sorting them by various criteria such as the date they when taken or their file name. With EXIF ReName you can combine these to obtain the optimal categorization.

A task many of us have run into and found it simple at the beginning but it proved to be rather time consuming is cataloging the photos taken with our digital cameras. This is particularly true if you stack a couple of thousands of pictures in a single location and then realize that they were made on many different occasions. That would be a good time to start cleaning the mess and put some order in those chock-full directories.

An important part of cataloging images (or any other type of document) is sorting them by name, an activity for which there are quite a lot of available software programs. In the case of photos, a great asset that has to be exploited is the existence of EXIF data in every single one of them. To use it in your advantage you need an application like  EXIF ReName.

As its name suggests, this tool will enable you to modify the current names of your pictures so it will make good use of the exchangeable image file format (EXIF) information. The installation is pretty straightforward so you can have it up and running in no time. More good news you will find when checking the price tag which has a big zero written on it, meaning that you'll be able to enjoy it for free.

The interface is bent on functionality, so great looks are not an attribute, but on the other hand, for this type of apps it would be better to get the job done well in the first place and look pretty later. Also, loading items can be done only with the built-in file explorer, because drag and drop is not supported.

EXIF ReName will use the capture date and time that it extracts from the files and adds them to the photo names. You will notice this when moving on to the renaming options.

The first mode preserves the initial names and puts them before or after the EXIF information, while the other implies you providing a new name to precede or succeed the date and time.

If neither of the above suits your needs, you can forsake adding or keeping names and use only the date and time setting that you will find in the 'Edit' menu. There is yet another way you can process the pictures, but it doesn't involve renaming them, the images will simply be copied to a location of your choice.

This application will allow you to specify the file name pattern by selecting this feature from the 'Tools' menu. You'll have at hand a variety of parameters to customize like separators for folder or file name figures, as well as for date and time, capitalization or lowercase letter usage and even the target file extension.

There is a drawback that will probably not be overlooked by any user and is worth mentioning at this time. It relates to the fact that you can rename only a single type of files in a batch. This means that if you have JPG and BMP pictures, for example, they will require separate processing for every format.

A nice function that can prove very useful for organizing the images is the automatic folder generation that is accessible via the 'Edit' menu. When this is option becomes active, EXIF ReName will create directories named from the year, month and day the photos were taken and store each processed file in its corresponding place.

There's one more goody waiting to be discovered and used in the same menu: a small time stamp editor. You can use it to alter the date and time for any photo with exchangeable image file format information attached to it. This tool even has a button that will imprint the current time when pressed.

When it comes down to the actual processing of the loaded pictures, you'll be happy to see that it takes a few seconds to complete the task and the stress on the system components is minimal. During out tests, the processor usage peaked at 3% while amount of memory needed was fewer than 9 MB.


The Good

The main strong points of this utility are the very good speed with which it gets the job done and the fact that it keeps the resource consumption at very low values. Another plus is the ability to automatically create folders, thus saving you some precious time, while the possibility to easily edit the EXIF data is not to be overlooked as well.

The Bad

Perhaps the most important disadvantage is the inability to handle several file formats in a single batch, which means that you'll have to spend extra minutes if you have photos saved with different extensions. Also, the renaming alternatives are somewhat limited and revolve around the date and time information attached to the images.

The Truth

On the whole, EXIF ReName performs well and succeeds in attaining its purpose of quickly modifying picture names based on the EXIF data that accompanies them. Nonetheless, there is definitely room for improvement insofar as the overall design and the feature department are concerned.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: