While teaching a Lightroom Essentials class at the Tampa Bay Shootout in Florida, I embarrassingly forgot to name my photos when I imported the images. I laughed and said, “Oops” as I proceeded to quickly batch rename the untitled images. The class stopped me and asked, “How did you do that!”  I walked them through a few simple steps and promised to write a quick tutorial to share with them and our Photofocus readers. I was told I need to mess up more often.

Steps for Batch Renaming in Lightroom

Step 1: Select all images by using keyboard shortcut Control + A, [win] or Command + A [mac]. You’ll notice the image cell boxes turn gray and the bottom bar will show how many images are selected.

Step 2: Launch the File Template Editor by clicking on File Name in the Metadata tab and selecting Edit from the File Naming dropdown menu.

Set 3: Type a new name in the editor box and select Original number suffix from the dropdown menu in the Image Name section. Click Insert to apply the original number suffix to the end of the new name. Example shows how the new filename will be applied. Click Done to return to the Rename dialog box. Click OK to apply the new filename with original number suffix.

File Template Editor Options

The first question asked during the class was: “Why did you add Original number suffix to the filename?” Using the original file number from the camera has always been a preference of mine. I have no problem changing the filename as along as I can keep the original number. I like to use this number as a serial number for the original image.Sometimes clients like to change the name of the images  I send them. That’s fine, but I tell them to always keep the original number in case I need to search for it in the future. Again, it’s a personal preference.