Why bother renaming your image files? Isn’t IMG_4232.RAW good enough for most photographers?
So you use an app, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, to manage yours: good choice. But what happens if you lose your catalog, and all that careful organization goes with it? One smart habit is to keep some specific, basic metadata in the filenames of your images. That way, you can gather a bit of information about the contents of your image files even if you catalog is corrupted—no extra apps needed.
Let’s learn how to use Adobe Lightroom for some pain-free, easy, better-organized image-name hacking.
How to Rename Images in Adobe Lightroom
Just in case you didn’t catch it in the video, let’s review the file naming convention I recommend. Every filename should be meaningful:
If you want to get really specific, or if you have two cameras you use at the same time (say for a wedding, for example), you can use year-month-day-hour/minute/second-description-camera-filename, or YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS-[description]-[original-filename].cr2
Keep Learning
Lightroom isn’t the only program that can rename images, and some of the alternatives offer distinct advantages. Check out the other tutorials below for other approaches to renaming and managing images using a variety of apps.
