How To Mass Rename iPhoto Pictures In 10 Easy Steps

I've actually had a lot of people asking me about this so it seemed like a good post to make. iPhoto grants you the ability to do batch changes which will allow you to apply a change the title, date or description of photos. The only problem with this is it only shows up in iPhoto information on the picture. What if you want to take all those picture and have them renamed? iPhoto hasn't evolved to the point of letting us do that but luckily we can use other Mac OS X software to accomplish this goal.

So want to change all those picture names from their cryptic P0519091825.jpg to names? Well you've come to the right place. This way might seem a little roundabout but it works perfectly.

1. First we want to take all the pictures we want renamed and place them into a folder. It doesn't matter what the folder name is.
2. Now we want to open up Automator from the Applications folder
3. Select to create a new workflow and drag the folder you just created into the empty workflow space
4. Now Select the Files & Folders pane and add the Get Folder Content action into your workflow by click and dragging or double clicking.
5. Once this is done check the "Repeat for each subfolder found" checkbox
6. Add the Rename File Items action to your workflow. (At this point a pop up will ask if you if you want to copy these files to preserve their original names. I would suggest doing so and once you're done you can just delete them)
7. Change the first drop down menu from "Add Date or Time" to Make Sequential
8. Click the New Name radio button and type in the name you want to give your files
9. The rest of the options are completely preferance related so I will stop instructing for those. (At the bottom of that action you can see an example of what it will look like to help you decide which options you want to choose.)
10. Now Run your workflow and it will rename all the files in your folder.

At this point I would go back to the first action in your workflow "Get Specified Finder Items" and remove the folder you have in there. Then save your workflow so you can come back to it whenever you want and just drop a new folder in there to rename different files. This of course works with any group of files or folders and not just pictures.

If you don't care to learn the process and just want to use it Click Here to download the workflow with simple 3 step instructions.