No way to make Windows rename an existing file by its own name automatically.
No way to make Windows rename an existing file by its own name automatically.
I frequently share updates here and receive excellent feedback. I’m truly thankful for everyone who takes the time to assist those in need. Your support means a lot, so many thanks! In my earlier post, I mentioned sorting through roughly 40k pictures from my life across multiple folders on one drive, trying to merge them into a single folder on another drive. I review each one carefully, keeping only what I like and deleting the rest. I often run into errors like “file name already exists, do you want to replace it,” which is frustrating since there’s no auto-rename option. Is there a setting I can enable to automatically rename files? Your help would be greatly appreciated.
There are options to rename multiple items at once that might help with your issue. You can assign unique names by adding numbers to each file, ensuring they don’t conflict during moves. I often use the bulk rename utility—it’s a reliable free solution. https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk
Total Commander has built-in Multi-rename tool. You can select the files, select the multi-rename tool and then you can say how you want the new names to be using tags like [C] for a counter (and you can specify how many leading 0s or to skip n numbers ex have 001, 003, 005 ) , [N5-10] for file name, from the 5th character to the 10th, and a lot of other tags are available. Here's an example I just made: - added a counter that starts at 5, and jumps by 2, and add leading 0s so there's always 2 digits. (such counters are great for example when you scan a bunch of pages - I often scan all odd pages, then all even pages, so when I'm done with the odd pages I rename the batch to add counter and have 001, 003, 005 ... and so on, then do the even batch by renaming to add 002, 004, and so on ... and then the two sets can be merged in one folder) - added " Picture " after the counter - Changed name to [N5-] to only keep the name from the 5th character to the end - Added year, month and date from the "File creation" attribute just to show it can be added (would make more sense to be added at the start, so you could sort files by date.