Clever Bulk Rename Trick in Windows

Stumbled into a clever way to rename a bunch of files to have the same prefix and a sequential numbered suffix… from the Windows GUI no less.

Ever want to rename a bunch of files to the same prefix, but have an incremental count after them?

From Explorer, select all the files that you want to bulk rename, right click, and select Rename.

While all of the files will be selected, only one is editable. Give the file a name, let’s pretend for the sake of discussion you typed ABC.jpg.

All of the rest of the files will be renamed ABC (1).jpg through ABC (n).jpg, where ‘n’ is the number of files minus one, since the first one doesn’t get a number.

Knowing this, you can do some clever stuff. Create one bogus file renamed to ZZZZZZZZ.TXT at the end of your list; select all the files, and bulk rename them as shown above. Then delete the bogus file, it should be the only one without a number, and you’ve just made a sequence of files.