When you capture pictures using your standard digital camera, they are saved either in the internal storage of the camera or on the SD memory card in form of JPEG files. Some camera also save the files in other formats such as the RAW data format. But in any case the files are named serial-wise, for example, DSC_0034.jpg DSC_0035.jpg, DSC_0036.jpg and so on. The file name does not convey much information about the contents of these images. You would want the JPEG filenames to indicate the date, time, location or event when the pictures were taken. You can quickly rename your JPEG files using a small tool called RenJPEG.
This small tool can rename JPEG files based on the creation date and the EXIF metadata stored inside the files. The user interface is designed in such a way that everyone can rename JPEG files in just two steps. First you have to drag-n-drop the folder containing your JPEG files to add them to the list in RenJPEG window. When you select the files in the list for RenJPEG, it displays the information stored in the EXIF tag of the selected JPEG file.
You can select the file name format to be used for renaming the files from the “Format” drop-down listbox. Clicking on this list, you can find all the various codes that add different strings to the file names. You can add the various formats of strings related to date, time, counter, character, camera make or model, picture resolution, and others to the new file name. You can also change the file extension for the files from JPEG, JPG, jpg or jpeg. Clicking on the Rename Selected or Rename All buttons will start the renaming process. It does not modify the original EXIF data stored inside the files during the renaming – only original files are copied with a new filename. It displays the old file names as well as new file names based on all the renaming criteria selected by you.
Even though Windows does not allow invalid characters when manually renaming files, if you copy files from some other operating systems some unusual characters are used in the file names. RenJPEG can automatically replace these invalid characters by a small dash. But you can change dash to something else from the options.
You can download RenJPEG from http://tp.lc.ehu.es/jma/win95.html.