Ever need to rename files in Lightroom? Sure you do. Lightroom’s renaming utility is pretty powerful, but there are things it can’t do, like search and replace. Do you need to change one character or string of characters into something else? Let’s say you use meaningful words in your file names. Perhaps you were photographing in my favorite national park, Olympic, and you wanted to include “olympic” in your file name. Only you accidentally spelled olympic as olympia, a common mistake. But you’ve just name 526 files with “olympia”. What to do? What. To. Do?

You could rename them one at a time. No thanks. You could use one of the many file naming utilities available for Windows or Mac. But that’s renaming outside of Lightroom and that’s a no-no if you want to keep track of your pictures. What you need to do is to change the names inside of Lightroom but without resorting to the mind numbing tediousness of changing them one at a time.

Fortunately, there’s a Lightroom plug-in that will come to your rescue: Rob Cole’s Lightroom File Renamer. The File Renamer can perform search and replace fine name changes, so all you’ll need to do is enter “olympia” in the search field and “olympic” in the replace field.

Here’s how:

Select all the images that need renaming.

Go to Library > Plug-in Extras > Rename Files – Start.

Enter the Search and Replace items.

Click Yes – add to rename collection.

You’ll see an instruction box pop up telling you what to do next. Which is rename the files using the ‘rc File Renamer’ preset. Now this instruction is a little unclear. What it means is that you need to go to the Lightroom menu item Library >  Rename Photos and choose ‘rc File Renamer’ from the list of presets that you can access from the drop down.

But before you can get to that you’ll see another dialog box asking if you want to see the log file. If you’re a coding geek, go for it. If not, just click “Cancel”.

After you’ve renamed the files there’s still one more step. Go back to Library > Plug-in Extras and choose “Rename files – Finish” and click OK. That’s it.

On a more practical note, what if you’ve included spaces or special punctuation in your file names. Some people include parentheses on occasion. If you only need to use your files on your local computer, then this doesn’t pose a problem. But if you want to put your images on the web, this can pose myriad problem. URLs don’t like spaces, for instance and will fill them with %20. If you use a JavaScript based gallery for your website, those parentheses will likely break it, as will any quotation marks.

So now you can see where the RC File Rename can save you lots of time and save you from splitting, web-based headaches.