With ever larger memory cards for cameras, bringing some sense to photo collections has never been more important.

A simple way to do this is to rename photos to describe what they are. Some photo managers do this, but doing it yourself with a utility such as Ken Rename is worth doing by hand.

The interface is easy to use, with all of the options appearing on one page. Files are selected by folder using a standard folder tree on the left-hand side of the program.

The files inside the folder can be filtered by the use a of wildcard. This is a special character that can represent one of any character ? or any number of characters *. For example *.jpg will show all of the files ending in .jpg and photo10?.jpg would show photo101.jpg and photo102.jpg but not photo1011.jpg.

Once the files have been selected, their names can be changed. It is a simple matter to quickly remove the parts of the file names that are not required and then add new counters, either by removing everything after a certain character or between two characters. The case can be converted as well. It can use information from MP3 tags or the EXIF data saved by most cameras.

A preview of the changes is updated at the same time as the settings, so there are no surprises when the names are changed for real.

There are lots of file renamers around these days but Ken Rename is both powerful and easy to use.