Question for the photographers

I recently completed a 10,176km road trip through northern BC, the Yukon and Northwest Territories all the way to Tuktoyaktuk.

I have a lot of photos on my phone and on my Canon. I can download them to my desktop and put them in one file OK but I don't know how I can arrange them in my preferred order without changing each file name. For example I took photos at the same location on 2 different days with other photos elsewhere between. If I sort by date the two groups of photos will have others in between. I guess I could rename them with the same date but that seems tedious.

Is there a program that would źlet me drag and drop files into the order I chose?

Thanks for any suggestions.
Gordon

Bulk Rename Utility.

You can select the files and alter the names in all sorts of ways. You can append, remove last n, insert at a position, all sorts. It's free too.

You could also divide the photos into folders and rename those in each folder, then move the back into one gib folder for viewing.

Otherwise leave them in folders numbered and named in order and view each one in sequence.

You can display pictures sorted in date order, at least I can.

If you have gps in your camera, You could use something like advanced renamer and rename all the files so the file name contains the date and gps location.

Could use a basic HTML web pages. Or make them into a gif movie.

@AllanWorms is spot on with his Bulk File Rename tip, it's a fab bit of kit for those of us who have forgotten all the old dos command stuff.

That's help you rename the files, which should then let them be displayed in filename order.

There's another route too. You can add 'tags' which are user info hidden inside the image file. You can then sort by tag. They can be place names, people's names, anything really. Kind of an alternative to putting images in a folder but much more useful because you can have loads of tags on each image if you like.

I'm wading through 15,000 family images that came from slides and negatives I've scanned. Using BFN and tags is making a very searchable archive.

ps. A tip for anyone doing this stuff. My scanner generates image numbers which I can give different prefixes. When I started I thought that numbering the images eg. A001, A002- A036 then B..., C... Then I labelled the envelope each set of negs A, B etc so that I could go back to that original from the file name. May or may not have been smart, but when I got BFN to rename the sets I had a bright idea to let the new name include the old name at the back. That let me have one enormous folder with all of the images in, but always able to find the original slide/neg. Which paid big time when I dropped a hard drive and lost a chunk of work in progress. Dead easy to find the old titled image on a back up.

Oh, also. Google made a thing called Picasa which was incredibly good at not only finding all the images on a pc but presenting them in albums in sensible order -without moving the images, so no danger of it interfering with your (my) half-arsed filing system. They withdrew it in favour of their Photos thing BUT I saved a copy of the installer if anyone wants it.

One useful thing for someone trying to rearrange storage is that you have complete control over where it looks, so there's no need to let it find all of them if you're only wanting to work on a few folders.