Today I discovered PowerToys!
I love it when I find a new-to-me tool that makes my life easier AND is super simple to use AND (even better) is FREE!
Today I was working on getting my genealogy files added to Zotero for easy access, and got to my folders with cemetery photos. They’re all well organized, but most of the photos still just have that auto-applied name of numbers. Ultimately I’d like to add the appropriate surname to each filename but that’s not going to happen for all of these today. So I started out renaming each file individually with the state and cemetery name as a prefix, but that got old real fast, so I went on the hunt for how to do that much more efficiently. That’s how I discovered Microsoft PowerToys. It’s a free app and easier than pie!
I’m using Windows 11, so I went down to my “Search” area (right next to the Windows symbol in the toolbar) and typed in PowerToys. It brought up the Microsoft PowerToys app as one of the options, and I clicked to install it.
Once installed, I opened the app and found a whole lot of interesting looking tools, but right now I’m looking for a specific one, and scrolled down and clicked on “PowerRename.”
Open up the folder on your computer that has the files you want to rename — you can rename all or just some. Select the files you want to rename, then right click with your mouse and choose Power Rename — if it doesn’t appear in that first list when right clicking, choose “More Options” then PowerRename.
This will then open a window with all the files you selected in a list — you can uncheck any that you don’t want to change at this point too.
At this point you may either replace part of the existing file name or add a prefix. If your files all begin with something like “IMG” and you want to remove that, you can put that in the top search bar and then in the second area, type in what you’d like to replace it with or leave it blank to delete the IMG. The new file names will now show up in the list to the right of the original file names.
If you just want to add a prefix to ALL the files, put this symbol “^” (without quotation marks) in that first search box, check “Use regular expressions” then in the next long empty box, type in the prefix you’d like to add to every filename.
Again, it immediately shows you both the original filenames in a list AND what it will look like renamed (which is handy if you decide you want to add or change anything). When it’s all good, hit Apply and it’s done!
Here’s what my screen looked like as I was adding the prefix “OH Frmngtn East” (for the East Farmington, Ohio Cemetery):
Now I’m excited to try out some of the other PowerToys to see how they can make my genealogy life easier!
