Now let's take a look at how to rename our files here inside of Bridge using one of the coolest little features they have built in here for automation, and its the Batch Renaming function. So I am going to go ahead and I am going to select all of these flower images again. I am just going to Shift+Click to select all of these. And what we are going to do is we are going to come up to the Tools Menu and we are going to select Batch Rename.

Inside the batch renaming dialog box you have the ability to choose your Destination Folder first and once you select your Destination Folder you can choose to rename inside the same folder meaning you will just add new files to the exact same folder you are in now, or you can move them to another folder meaning that you are going to take the physical files rename them and move them to another folder so that the original files are actually just changed into new files and they are not going to be stored in the original folder. Or you can take them, rename them and copy the new named files to another folder. This is what I am going to choose to do. I am going to choose to Copy to another folder, just like that. I am going to select the Browse button here to select the destination folder.

Inside here I will choose my Chapter 02 project files folder, I will select make New Folder. I am going to Ctrl+Click over PC, right-click on this and choose Rename and I am going to rename this file new images. I will go ahead now and click OK and now you see that it makes a direct path to where I want to save these on the hard drive. And now let's talk about how to rename our files here. So the first part of this is going to be the actual name of the file here. So I will go ahead and say Flowers. And you will notice as you update these fields here in the middle but it actually updates itself and gives you a full preview of what your file name is going to look like down here in the bottom of the Preview Window, down here at the bottom of the dialog box. So just be looking at that to get an accurate preview of exactly what each file name is going to look like.

Now I don't really want the date created to be in the file name because that takes up a whole lot of room and I really just don't want file names that are that big. So I am going to go ahead and I am going to click this minus (-) button here to go ahead and delete that from the sequence. And you will notice that it updated itself down here so now it's just Flowers_0001. So I am going to leave that underscore in there because it creates a little bit of separation between the actual filename and the sequence number that we've got applied here.

Now the sequence number you can change it to anything you want. You can have it start at 0, you can have it start at 1 or you can even have it started any arbitrary number you want to. For instance if you had a series of images that you've already batch renamed and let's say you left off at number 26 and you wanted to start this series at number 27, you can go ahead and say start this sequence at 27.

Then you also have the ability to control the number of digits here. I think 4 might be a little bit too many for this. Let's go ahead and we will change this to 3. You will notice it updates itself down there in the bottom, so now we have Flowers_001.jpg.

So this is exactly what I want to name these files. This is a good naming structure in my opinion. So I will go ahead and leave that as it is now. And now I am going to come back down here to the Options and I want to preserve the current filename in the XMP Metadata. What this is going to do is preserve that original filename in the XMP Metadata so that it's always there in case you ever need to get back to it at any given time. So if you did a search for Flower Orange-2.jpg, that file will still show up in your search simply because that is still embedded inside that file's metadata.

So it's just good if you happened to lose these files, forget what you name them, you could always go back to that original naming structure to help you when you are trying to locate these files in the future.

Now I am also going to come down here and talk about the Compatibility. You want to make sure that these filenames are compatible with any other operating system. Especially if you are going to be outputting files for clients to different printers, or if you are going to be sending it out to web services or things like that, companies that use different operating systems you need to be aware of that. And you also need to make sure that your files are as compatible with other operating systems as possible. So what you need to do is go ahead and check the boxes down here.

Now these boxes are going to be different depending on which operating system you currently on. For instance I am on the Windows platform now. So the Windows box is grayed out and I have the Mac OS and the UNIX boxes active. If you are on the Mac Operating System, the Mac box would be grayed out and you would have the Windows and Unix boxes active for you to be able to check. So whichever boxes you have and are able to check, go ahead and check both of those at this time, that way you can maximize that compatibility and you will sort of cut down on those issues when switching between platforms.

Now that you have done that you can come up here and you are ready to go ahead and hit the Rename button. Once you do that Bridge is going to take all of this new data apply it to all those files and we should see that new folder of images appear in the Content Window and once we have that we will double-click inside of there and take a look at our new renamed files. So I will go ahead and click Rename. Bridge goes through. It renamed them almost instantly there. You didn't really see anything happen, but it did happen. Here is the new images folder we created, let's double-click on that to get in there and there is Flowers_001, 002, 003 and 004 and so forth and so on. So all of those have changed just like we needed them to. They are all within that new folder and we still have all those original files back in our original protect files folder. So this is just how to utilize the batch Renaming feature to create alternate files for sequencing here inside of the Adobe Bridge.