I am working on a project whereby I am scanning my parents' old photos. Scans or the original image are assigned a 3 digit image #. I am also zooming in on portions of many of the images and rescanning zoomed in portion or scanning the backs (if they contain written notes). I have been renaming each with a letter at the end of the image # so the scans where I zoomed in or the backs of the images are connected to the original image by the b, c, d, etc. added to the end.
Ex: 101.jpg
101b.jpg
101c.jpg the next image might be 104.jpg, 104b.jpg, 105.jpg, etc. My scanner automatically assigns a # to each image but as I'm renaming them to add a b or c at the end, it leaves a lot of gaps in the numerical order of it all. Is there a way to rename them and keep the suffix of b, c, or other info I've added to the file name but remove all the gaps in #'s?
2nd question: I've figured out how to add a new numbering sequence as a prefix and have manually gone through and adjusted the file names which have the b, c, etc. in a couple of my folders because I don't know if there is another way to renumber and remove the gaps in sequence. I am now trying to figure out how to remove the old numbers in the filename. Because it's in a sequence, 001, 002, 005, 006, 010, etc., how do I tell it to delete a portion of the filename and only the 3#'s which follow it.
Ex: 001.album1_101_1936.jpg
002.album1_103_16x20.jpg
003.album1_107.jpg
003b.album1_107b.jpg
003c.album1_107c.jpg
I would like to remove the _101, _103, _107 portions of the middle of each file name, keeping the b, c, d, dates or any other info after those digits. Because many of the new file names also have a b or c after the new #, I cannot tell it to delete characters 11-14. In file names with a letter after the 3 digit image#, I would need to delete digits 12-15.
I don't understand how all the features work, so any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated. I could always go through and renumber/rename manually but I will likely make mistakes along the way and I have a few thousand photos to do.
thanks!