You have hundreds of photos, movies and images on your computer from a variety of devices. Your phone, your computer, your tablet, your camcorder and all of your other devices all have different file naming conventions--not to mention all the photos you’ve received from friends an family or downloaded from the Internet. One of the best ways to keep your photos organized is to rename them in a logical, consistent fashion. There are two free programs that allow you to rename hundreds of photos in just a few clicks.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a handy free program that comes as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite. Windows Live Photo Gallery goes through your hard drive and sniffs out all of your photo and image files and pulls them together into an easy to use library. in Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can select multiple images and then rename them all at once. To do so, drag a box around the photos you’d like to rename, or click the first photo in a series, hold shift and then click the last photo. In the details pane in the bottom-right hand corner, look for a field called “file name.” With the photos selected, go ahead and change the value of this field by clicking it and typing a new file name. This will give all of the photos you’ve selected that file name. To avoid overlapping the file names, Windows Live Photo Gallery will assign each one a number, such as myphoto-1.jpg, myphoto-2.jpg, myphoto-3.jpg, etc. Note that you can also do this without Windows Live Photo Gallery by selecting a group of photos in Windows Explorer, right-clicking and choosing Rename.

Google Picasa 3.8

Picasa also has a batch renaming function that has a few more features. Like Windows Live Photo Gallery, Picasa is free and pulls together all of your photos from your hard drive into a library. You can select multiple photos in Picasa in the same way as you would in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Once you’ve selected the photos you’d like to rename, click File > Rename. Or, you can press F2 on the keyboard.

This will bring up the rename dialog. Begin by choosing a base file name for your photo or group of photos. If you do not choose any other options, your file names will have the same sequential file naming rule as with Windows Live Photo Gallery, e.g. myphoto-1.jpg, myphoto-2.jpg, etc.

But with Picasa, you can add other automatically generated data. The first option is to add the date taken. Most cameras and devices will automatically add the date to the photo’s meta data. If the photo doesn’t have this data appended, you can add it in Picasa. With this option checked, your photos will have the base file name plus the date and time taken. For example, myphoto 05-21-2011 6:00PM.jpg Note that you won’t get the -1, -2, -3, etc. numbering unless you have two photos with the exact same date taken.

The other option you can choose is to include the resolution. This is the size in pixels of the image. This is handy if you have multiple versions of the same picture. For example, if you have a thumbnail, medium, large and full size version of your photos, this option will help you keep them organized, e.g. myphoto_640x480.jpg myphoto_320x240.jpg, etc.

Whether you’re using Windows Live Photo Gallery or Picasa, renaming your photo using these batch methods is much easier than renaming them one at a time.