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Participating Frequently
April 11, 2022
Open for Voting

P: Support search and replace in file renaming presets

  • April 11, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 674 views

Lightroom Classic 11.2 on MacOS Catalina 10.15.7.

 

In the batch file renaming feature accessed through the hamburger icon to the right of the File Name field in the Library module, I often need to search and replace particular text. I don't see a way to, for example, replace "Jan1969-" with "1969-01-", which I wanted to do this week because I had improved my file naming system and wanted to update my old files' names.

 

Even better would be to support entering an arbitrarily long list of replacements to make in one pass, with a "+" or "Add" button to add more "From" and "To", or "Old" and "New", boxes.  For example,

 

Old: Jan1969 New: 1969-01

Old: Feb1969 New: 1969-02

Old: Mar1969 New: 1969-03

 

A further enhancement to that feature would be to give either the whole list or each entry a pulldown like in the Library module Text Filter, specifying Contains, Starts With, or Ends With.

 

I could actually benefit from a full-blown regular expression matcher, but I guess that's a bit much to ask of a consumer program like Lightroom.

 

3 replies

Inspiring
November 8, 2022

Please implement "String Substitution" to the rename options in Lightroom, like we have in Bridge.

Adding text or numbers is easy in the LR rename function. Erasing text or numbers from the file name is a nightmare.

Yes you can always go to Adobe Bridge to do that but once you change the name you will lose Virtual copies, the history of the file retouching, flags, etc.

But it is a very powerful rename function that would solve a lot of problems of the limited rename function that is used by LR.

 

And please stay away from REGEX. Geeks might love them. 99.99% of people hate them . Make it easy. We are in 2022 and not when the first Atari computers were invented. There are multiple ways to achieve the same as REGEX but in a visual understandable way for every one and not only Nobel prize winners

 

 

johnrellis
Legend
November 8, 2022
Inspiring
October 29, 2022

It is time to completely develop the rename function into a much flexible one. What happens for example if I want to remove a specific letter from a file name in the middle of it, or a number or exchange one number for another. The rename function now is very simple. Please improve it to something more flexible. There are many other rules that can be applied in case we need to batch specific changes quicky.

Thank you

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 1, 2022

While I agree that the batch rename function should have more options than it currently has, I am not sure from your request that you are actually talking about batch renaming. If you want to rename a single image, then be aware that you can do this directly in the metadata panel. That means that removing a letter from the middle of the filename of a single image is as easy in Lightroom as it is in the Macintosh Finder or Windows Explorer.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
johnrellis
Legend
April 12, 2022

I agree that would be useful. While waiting for Adobe to implement this, you might consider this approach, which uses a plugin:

http://lightroomsolutions.com/complex-file-renaming-in-lightroom-thanks-to-search-and-replace/