[DrWatson]

Dear all. I work for an organisation that is new (last 7 years) to using computers and it's a fairly large organisation too! The problem is that the organisation has never adopted a standardised naming convention for storing data on shared drives. With increasing Freedom of Information requests and other requests for data retrieval, ensuring we can identify the correct information comprehensively is proving now to be hazardous.

We can implement policy stating everyone should, from this day forward, adopt a convention but, for previously recorded files this will still be problematic.

And so, to the crux of this thread, does anyone know of anything that can re write previous files collectively rather than having to go to each file and re write each one individually?

I think I have read somewhere that Google Picassa can do this but can anyone offer anything on this or anything else for that matter.

Thanks all

[Mike0001]

Are you talking about renaming files? Oscar's File Renamer is good at that.

[DrWatson]

Yes Mike, renaming files is what I mean. I'll have a look at Oscar's and see if this will do the job. The same applies to any other viewers, I want to re write old file names en masse to a new, standardised format...

[MJM]

I have previously used Ant Renamer to batch rename (mostly images and video segments) into order.

The real issue here though is that you:
1.) Come up with a reliable naming convention
2.) Figure out how this applies to old file names

All I know is that you didn't previously have naming conventions, yet some sort of structure must have existed (or else no one would've ever been able to find a file). It is quite a difficult question.

I mean you could have file names like

meeting 11.11.1111
meeting xx.xx.xxxx
etc.
or
meeting about ...
or
meeting #823654
or
something even more abstract. You may have to create several "profiles" of which to rename. All a file batch renamer can do is help you, once you've grouped them and know how you want to rename them.
I know there are some batch renamers that allow you to enter small scripts for renaming (as in go through a list of names, etc), but most only allow alphanumeric iteration with constants.

Some examples could possibly help. At the end of the day, to me it sounds like you need a file batch renamer with enough AI to recognise structure in the structureless. Could be hard.