EXIF ReName

Those who own a digital camera know how easily and quickly their photo collection grows – especially with the ever-growing storage capacity of today’s flash cards.

Moving all those JPGs to your computer is also a simple and easy process. However, telling one picture from the next just by looking at their file names is nearly impossible. We all end up with dozens of folders containing thousands of images with names like IMG_XXXXX.JPG or similar. Here is where a program like EXIF ReName can be of use.

EXIF ReName is a free and compact tool capable of renaming all your JPEG photographs using the date and time they were taken. To do so, the program reads the metadata embedded in your photographs by your digital camera (EXIF data) and adds them to the existing file name following your preferences. These preferences include the possibility of adding a text to the EXIF time and date, so that it may give you a hint of what the image is about. I have used that to classify my pictures by location, adding the name of the place to the EXIF date stamp, thus helping me to put my memories in order.

If you are not happy with the date and time provided by the camera, you can always edit them using EXIF ReName, though this operation needs to be performed on a one-by-one basis. As a bonus, it is worth knowing that this free tool supports Canon’s RAW format files.