Automatic File Renumbering

The download wizard can rename/renumber image files on the fly, while downloading them. This may not sound like a big deal, but I suspect that this feature, along with DateStore automatic folder selection, will quickly become most users' favorites. Why?

When you take a picture with a digital camera, it is stored as an image file named with an alphabetic prefix and a numeric suffix corresponding to its sequence in the "roll." Different cameras use different prefixes, but they all work pretty much the same way. Thus the first picture I took with my old Ricoh RDC-5000 was named RIMG0001.JPG, and the latest picture I took with my Minolta Dimage Xi was named PIC0072.JPG.

The problem with this setup becomes obvious when it's time to download image files to your computer, because the files have exactly the same names as the last batch you downloaded*. Since two files with the same name cannot coexist in the same folder, your choice is either to manually rename them (a tedious chore indeed) or to download them into a new folder.

From an organizational point of view, sometimes a new folder will be desirable but many times it will not; do you really want 3 separate folders for your summer vacation pictures? Over time, you can end up with pictures stored in a bewildering array of folders.

The wizard's automatic renumbering capability, which makes this problem disappear, is very simple. It works as follows:

 When you have selected the source folder, the files to be downloaded, and the destination folder, the wizard checks the destination folder for any enumerated files (ie, files named as described above, with a numeric suffix) with the same names as those to be downloaded.

 If any are found, the wizard then determines the highest numbered file, and

 Renames ALL of the enumerated files as they are downloaded by adding this number to their original number.

Example

You instruct the wizard to download files PIC0001.JPG through PIC0055.JPG to a folder that already contains files named PIC0001.JPG through PIC0040.JPG. Since 40 is the highest number, the incoming files are renamed PIC0041.JPG to PIC0095.JPG.

Note that the wizard's renaming process preserves the original sequence of the downloaded files. In this example, technically it did not need to rename the files numbered 41-55 because there were no files with these numbers in the destination folder. If it had not, however, the incoming files numbered 1-40 would have been renumbered starting at 56 and the sequence would have been broken (by broken, I mean that the file numbers no longer correspond to the order in which the pictures were taken).