Another thing that we told you guys to avoid when importing your images was to rename them upon import. So remember, if we’re back in that import dialogue, we had that option to actually rename files right here. I would say to skip that. Don’t rename upon import, and the reason is you generally want to verify the images after they’ve been imported and before you’re going to clear a memory card. To do this, we’ll verify the file name of the first image as well as the last image on the memory card to what’s in our catalog and what’s in the Originals folder. So what I would do is right click on the Originals folder and I would say show and explore, and I would look for what is the first file name and what is the last file name? Are all the images present? Do we have the right number compared to the memory card? Then and only then do we ever clear a memory card.
When you rename these images upon import, your file names don’t match up. In addition, well, it can create other headaches during the workflow process if you ever need to check back to your original images or that original card. So what I would say is, if you’re going to rename, do it at the end of your workflow and the way that you’re going to do that, it’s pretty actually quite simple. Press control+A or command+A to select the images that you want to rename. You’re going to press F2. Now, if I escape out of this, you can also get there by going to our library menu and going to rename photos, which again, it shows us F2. So, by doing this, F2 brings up this renaming dialogue, and this is where we can basically choose a file naming methodology.
So it gives us different options. We can have a custom name and a sequence. We can choose to go by the file name in a sequence, in which case we don’t have to enter in any custom texts because it’s just going to use the file name and then a sequence number. We can also edit and create our own file naming sequence. So, for example, I could say, “Okay, well, I’m going to clear this whole thing out.” What I want to start with is the original file name. I’m going to insert the original file name here. And then I want a dash between that. So now, after the original file name, I want a dash and then I want to put in the date. And then after the date, I want to put another dash and I want to put in a sequence number. So that’s how you can create a custom preset sequence name. You simply would choose what you want to place in what section.
But you could also make it as simple as just custom name sequence, which is just going to be, let’s say that these are already renamed. So I don’t want to confuse you guys by renaming these again and then have you not be able to match things up. So I’m just going to do an example and we’ll escape out of it to not apply it. So I’m going to say, let’s call these our Lightroom Tutorial Images, and it’s going to start with a sequence number of one. So you’ll see one. If I want to, I can do this. I can go edit, and with this sequence, I can actually change the sequence to have four digits. So I can drop down and customize that sequence and say, “I want it to be a four digit sequence so that way it’ll show 0001, and it’ll count from there. This can sometimes help in file naming systems to keep things kind of in order. You know what I mean.
So I’m going to have a four digit sequence starting with the number one. You can also change this number to 25, if you want to start from a certain point. But usually. We’re just going to start with one. From there, you press okay and it’s going to rename each of these images accordingly. We’ve already named these photos, so we don’t need to do this, but this is how you would rename or even create your own custom settings for renaming files. You’re going to do it right here in this dialogue. So remember from the library module, select the images that you want to rename. You can do that by pressing control+A or selecting a grouping of images, then press F2 to bring up the renamed dialogue. Enter in your custom text or choose the file naming methodology or customize however you like, then press, okay. That’s it for renaming. Let’s go ahead and move on.
