Renumbering files to change the sequence

[StewartR]

I have an awkward little problem. I use BRU extensively to maintain file archives, and I think I'm reasonably familiar with how to use most of its functionality, but this one's stumped me...

Here's the background (for interest; it's not essential to understanding my problem).
I have a huge load of 35mm film negatives which I'm getting scanned and digitised for manipulation on a computer. The negatives are in strips containing 4 negatives per strip. The staff at the lab who do the digitising are very diligent in making sure that they feed the strips into the machine in the correct order. However for some technical reason the machine reads them right to left rather than left to right. This means that the resulting file names have the wrong sequence. For example if a strip contains negatives 3, 4, 5 and 6 then the filenames will be 6, 5, 4, and 3 respectively.

So what I typically have is 25 files in a folder, with the names out of sequence. I want to renumber them:
From 01, 05, 04, 03, 02, 09, 08, 07, 06, 13, 12, 11, 10, ...
To 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, ...

I can of course manually re-arrange the files in the BRU file list, then delete the sequence number and apply an autonumber. But that's quite tedious. Any ideas how I can do it automatically?

[Admin]

Hi,

I'm assumign you are sorting the files by date? If so, why not just completely remove the filename ("Remove" in the filename box dropdown), then create a new filename using a simple 2-digit padded (by 1) autonumber?


Jim

[StewartR]

Hi Jim, and thanks for such a quick response.

No, I'm not sorting the files by date. I can't, because they all have identical date/time stamps. (That seems to be the way they come out of the scanning machine.)

What I'm doing is manually dragging the files into the correct order, based on the filename. The first file usually has the correct number, so I drag the files around in the file list until they are sorted as:

file01
file05
file04
file03
file02 etc.

and then when delete the last 2 characters and apply a padded autonumber I get:

file01 unchanged
file05 -> file02
file04 -> file03
file03 -> file04
file02 -> file05 etc.

which is what I want.

More generally, if the original filename has the number 4X + Y (where Y=0, 1, 2, or 3) then I want to change the number to 4X + (5-Y).

[Admin]

Ok I understand. No, there's no automated way to achieve this within BRU I'm afraid, it's a fairly specialised requirement.

However if you are getting this arrangement time and time again then you could create a text file and use the "rename pairs" facility. Just have a pre-defined text file setup, and use it each time.


Jim

[StewartR]

Doh. I wasn't aware of the "rename pairs" facility but of course that's the answer. Thanks very much.