How can I do this? (mass rename files)

ngc94227

Hello all!

I have a question about how to do this in such a way that it takes not so much time.

I´ve got some external HD´s with many vids of different persons. Every person in his own directory (further on I refer to this as the root-directory).

But there are many vids that are almost the same (of same date, but different in size, duration, type(mp4 or mkv etc.) or quality).

So I want to choose which of these "doubles" I can delete to free up space on the external disks.

The problem however is that the date embedded in the filename is different, eg. in some with ddmmyy-style, in other yyyymmdd or even yymmdd. And the name of the person is sometimes written in full or with his initials alone. That means that the vids which are of same date are not sorted in such a way that they are directly near each other. I can´t compare the vids quickly, because one can be at the top of the directory, other far more below. So every time I have to search and have to go back and forth in the directory. And because I´m a little bit lazy, I´m tired of this..........

The way to go is of course the mass-file-renamer. The embedded date should be at the beginning of the filename in one date-style after renaming to get a good sort. The name is then not important because of its position in the filename (after the date). But how do I do this relatively quickly?

My idea was to put the different date-styles per person in separate directories beneath the root-directory. And then use the mass-file-renamer 3 times for each date-style. If I could save the 3 renaming-options it would already be of help. And after that, the files of the 3 directories are moved back to the root-directory. But if one has other possibilties to do this more far more elegant, please reply!

Thanks in advance and kind regards,

ngc94227

jv16

Can you post some examples of the different filenames (how they are now) and how you would like to rename them?

ngc94227

Let´s say the name of this person is Thomas Black. And there are 5 videos of this person of the same date, eg. 24. March 2014. All are of the same "event", but differ by duration and or quality and therefore filesize. Filetype is NOT important.

I will have filenames like these:

1. Thomas_Black24032014_on-tour-in-the-USA.mkv

2. Thomas_Black140324YX.mp4

3. Thomas_Black240314.flv

4. 20140324TB_in-LA.avi

5. TB24032014He-does-it-again.avi

And so on. So the first problem is the different formats of the date. As you can see, I have dates in ddmmyy-format and yymmdd and even other ones. I have to separate different formats FIRST manually in different sudirectories because Powertools (or any other program) can´t distinguish between these formats how to interpretate them. After that, the corrected date (every file renamed in yyyymmdd-style-format) has to be put at the beginning of the filename to get a good sort. And there is where the file mass renamer comes into play. After renaming I can move the files back to the rootdirectory. Because then all 5 files are next to each other in the explorer. And then I can sort them out manually (this is get rid of the unwanted ones).

So the problem is that I have to rename files in every subdirectory (due to it date-format) one by one. If I could save the renaming formats as presets for every date-format this would already be of help.

I hope this clarifies what I mean.

Kind regards,

ngc94227