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[♪♪] [Adobe Creative Suite Podcast]
[Learn CS5]
[with]
[your host]
[Terry White]
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast.
My name is Terry White, and in this episode we get to take a quick look
at one of my most favorite used features inside of Adobe Bridge CS5.
It's actually a feature--I use it more like a utility--for batch renaming files.
Anyone who has watched my podcasts in the past
knows that as a photographer I'm a Lightroom user,
but there is one feature that I use all the time in Bridge,
even if I'm using Lightroom to manage my photos for everything else.
And again, that's the batch renaming feature.
So let me explain what happened here.
I import my photos into Lightroom, do all my editing, sorting, managing,
retouching in Photoshop, and then when I'm done I export out the client's photos
for Web and for print.
So I would normally have two different folders containing one being high res,
one being low res.
So I have the print folder here for a client,
and I want to show you what happens.
When you look in this folder, you'll see that the images are there.
But if you look at the file names, the file names automatically get the word Edit
added to them when you do a round trip into Photoshop from Lightroom.
So you open up the image in Photoshop once you're in Lightroom
and you do any changes to it.
When you save it, it goes back to Lightroom, but it always puts this word Edit on the end of it.
Speaking of that, how did it get the rest of the name?
How did it get the Amanda name on the beginning of it?
Well, I did that upon import.
And even if you're not a Lightroom user, you can do that in Bridge.
So for example, there is a Get Photos from Camera command,
which will of course work with your camera over USB or a card reader.
So when you do your Get Photos to drop them into a folder,
you have the option of renaming the files upon import.
So you don't have to use those generic camera names and numbers;
you can have them renamed and even--my favorite option--
convert to DNG if you're shooting in RAW.
So those are the things I would do if I were using Bridge to bring in my photos,
and that would give me a leg up on the file name.
So I'd have the file name and a sequence number,
but again, once I go into Photoshop and save it back,
at least working with Lightroom, it's going to always put this word Edit on the end of it.
So before CS5, I used to painstakingly go in in the operating system, in the Finder,
select the word Edit and either take it out or change it to the word Print.
And by the way, I do use the word Print for the high res
and I use the word Web for the low res ones
so that way the client will know the difference as to which ones are which.
However, I don't want to have to do that manual step anymore.
It would be great if Lightroom or Bridge--
in this case we're going to use Bridge--could do it for me after the fact.
I do want to point out a tip here.
If you are looking at a folder of images and you just want to name them
different names for each image, when you click twice, like once to select the image
and then once again, notice it highlights the name
and it will stop short of the file extension.
So that means you can start typing. We can call this Amanda.
By the way, I'll put the Edit back in so we can fix that later.
And when I hit Tab, here's your tip: it will go to the next photo
and it will automatically highlight the name.
So therefore, it's gone ahead and changed the name which, by the way, resorted
in my sort order, so that's why it moved it.
But it's gone ahead and put the selection on the next photo, already highlighting the name.
So you can type, tab, type, tab, type, tab to go to each photo
and name them individually if you want to.
And by the way, it is actually renaming the file, so there is no undo,
there is no way back.
I'd have to manually go back now and change that name to what it used to be,
which if I remember correctly, I think that was number 51.
And let's just go ahead and put that in real quick.
We'll make that one--well, if it wasn't 51, it's going to be 51 now.
All right. So I've got the names again the way they came out of Lightroom and Photoshop.
Now I want to take out the word Edit and replace it with the word Print.
And that is our tip for the day.
So I'm going to go ahead and select all of the images.
I select the first one, hold down the Shift key, select the last one.
You can deselect or select discontiguous selections.
On the Mac you'd hold down your Command key,
and on Windows I believe it would be your Control key,
to select individual photos instead of a whole range.
But in this case I do want them all, so I'll select all the photos.
I could also do a Select All command.
Now that I've got the photos all selected, I'll go up to my Tools menu,
I'll come down to Batch Rename.
When I do a batch rename, it brings up this by default,
so it always wants to do this.
Name it project, use the date created. It's pulling that off the metadata.
It'll do an underscore, and then it'll start numbering with a 4-digit number, number 1.
And as you can see at the bottom, if I let it go,
that's what it's going to rename all these photos to, and of course I don't want that.
So let's go ahead and start taking out some of these things we know we don't need.
We know we don't need the date, we know we don't need that underscore,
I don't even need this number.
And you know what? I'm not even going to change the name. The name is fine.
I like the Amanda name that's on them.
There is one new thing that I want to do, and that is if I go to the pop-up menu here,
there is a new command in Bridge CS5 called String Substitution.
And I have to thank the engineer that made this possible
because this is exactly what I needed to be able to do.
So what this String Substitution allows me to do
is type in the part of the file name that I want to change
and replace it with just the part that I want to replace it with.
So I want to find anywhere that it says the word Edit
and replace it with the word Print, just that easily.
You can see here at the bottom it's going to do exactly that.
It's going to change all the words that say Edit to Print,
leaving the rest of the file name and extensions alone.
And again, that's the beauty of it.
There's also a new button here called Preview.
We click that. It'll show you what each file is going to be renamed.
So if you're doing a bunch of files and you kind of want to make sure it's going to do it right,
you can check the preview first.
And there's even an Export to CSV, which is a comma delimited file,
so you can open that up in a word processor or spreadsheet
so you have a physical record of what the file names used to be
and what they got changed to.
Great new options.
Of course you can rename them in the same folder,
you can move them to a different folder or copy them.
So it would leave the originals and the original names alone
and make a new copy with the new names into a folder of your choice.
This is exactly what I want to do. And you know what? I do this all the time.
So there's a new option in CS5 to let it be a preset.
I'm going to go ahead and make this a preset.
I'm just going to call it Edit to Print because that's what it is.
So now the next time, I won't even have to come in and take all those things out
or put new ones back in.
I'll just switch to my Edit to Print preset, and it will set all this up for me.
Now we'll just go ahead and say Rename, and it's so fast it just happens.
That was it. It's done.
It's renamed all the Edits to Prints in my folder, and I am so happy
because that's exactly what I needed to do.
So that's it for this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast.
My name is Terry White. Thanks for watching.
