Ubuntu – How to batch rename files (.jpg) randomly

batch-rename

Ok, so I have a digital photo frame that I have, and view my photos from a USB.
Everything works fine, however, there is no way to display the pictures randomly. So, I have to watch my pictures in order, which is fine but not really what I want.

I am wondering if there is a way to have my .jpg pictures, that I view to be batch renamed, but renamed randomly? Be it adding random characters to the start of the name or replacing the characters before .jpg

Thank you for your time and answers.

Best Answer

I suppose the following could work. Assuming the prefix of your filenames is "DSC" you can use the following command in the terminal (untested!)

cd /path/to/photos
rename 's/DSC/'$RANDOM'/' *.jpg

This uses the perl rename command to match regular expressions and replace them. In this case, we are substituting "DSC" with a random number in the filename for all .jpg files. Change the "DSC" to whatever your photos' prefix is.

another method (also untested) is with a bash script:

#!/bin/bash
for f in *.jpg; do
  mv "$f" $RANDOM-"$f"
done

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Batch rename files to lowercase

For each file a_file in current directory rename a_file to lower case.

for a_file in *;do mv -v "$a_file" `echo "$a_file" | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]` ;done;

For upper case reverse the arguments to [:lower:] [:upper:]

tr command reference link

Update

For even more control * can be replaced with ls.

For example in a directory containing 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, 1.jpg, 2.jpg and 3.jpg in order to filter only *.jpg files, ls can be used:

for a_file in $(ls *.jpg);do mv -v $a_file `echo $a_file | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]` ;done;

The above code will assign to a_file variable all files with .jpg extension.

Update added -v option to mv command as per sds suggested.

Ubuntu – How to batch rename files (images) based on CSV file

This should work for you:

sed 's/"//g' files.csv | while IFS=, read orig new; do mv "$orig" "$new"; done

Explanation:

sed 's/"//g' files.csv : remove the quotes
IFS=, : split the input on ,
while read orig new; do ... done : This will read each input line, split it on the value of $IFS (here a comma) and save the 1st field as $orig and the rest as $new.
mv "$orig" "$new" : this will rename the files as requested.

If your file only contains file names (like orig.jpg) and no paths (not /home/take2/orig.jpg or similar), the command above will only affect files in your current directory. So, you need to open a terminal, cd to the target directory and run it there.

Test first:

To test this, you can do a dry run first by printing the commands that will be run without actually executing them:

sed 's/"//g' files.csv | while IFS=, read orig new; do echo mv "$orig" "$new"; done

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Batch rename files to lowercase

Ubuntu – How to batch rename files (images) based on CSV file

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