Renaming Files

Renaming a file or folder is simple. Just right-click the item you want to rename and choose Rename. The existing name will become highlighted in blue. You can type a new name, or edit the current name, and then press Enter.

If you’ve taken filename extensions out of hiding, that part of the name won’t be highlighted. For example, the .jpg extension on the photo named Clearwater.jpg shown in Figure 28.13 isn’t highlighted. That’s because you don’t want to change the extension unless you really know what you’re doing. Guessing is unlikely to work. At the very least, make sure you know the extension you’re about to change. That way, if you ruin the file, you can rename the file back to the original extension (in case you miss the opportunity to undo the rename).

FIGURE 28.13 The filename extension is not highlighted

Undoing a rename

You can undo a rename as you can undo just about anything else. But as always, you have to do so fairly soon after the rename. Just press Ctrl+Z or click the Organize button and choose Undo. If it’s too late for that, you have to rename the file again back to its original name and extension.

So How Do I Change a File’s Type?

You can’t simply change a file’s extension to change the file’s type. If you can open the file, and it’s not a music or video file, you may be able to just choose File Save As from the opening program’s menu. Then set the Save As Type option to the file type you want before you click the Save button.

If it’s a music or video file, you’ll likely need a conversion program. Search the web or a download site such as www.download.com or www.tucows.com for convert ext1 to ext2 (where ext1 is the extension of the file type from which you want to copy, and ext2 is the extension of the file type to which you want to copy) and see what programs you can find.

In some cases, you simply need the right program, app, or reader to open the file without converting it. Some common examples include .pdf files, which require Adobe Reader (www.adobe.com) or the new Windows Reader app, QuickTime movies and iTunes (players are available from www.apple.com), and Office documents and snapshots. Viewers for many such files are available from the Windows Store and http://download.microsoft.com.

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Renaming multiple files

To rename multiple files, select all of their icons using any methods described near the start of the chapter. Then right-click any one of them and choose Rename. Type the new name (again, don’t change the extension if it shows up) and press Enter. The files will all be given the name you specified. All but the first will have numbers. For example, if you renamed to River, the files will be named River, River (2), River (3), River (4), and so forth.

If you have a relatively large number of files and want to rename just a part of the filename for each one, you can turn to the Command Prompt to rename the files. For example, assume that you have a set of files named img-old-01.jpg, img-old-02.jpg, img-old-03.jpg, and so on in sequence. You want to replace the word “old” with the word “new.” Here’s how to do it:

The question marks in the command essentially tell Windows to leave those characters alone. In this example, the sequential image numbers remain the same and only the word in the middle of the filename is changed.

Before you try renaming multiple files using the command console in this way, we suggest you make a backup copy of the files in a different folder. That way, if you really mess up the filenames by typing an incorrect command, you can simply copy the files back to the original folder to restore the old filenames.