You can rename every photo in a folder at once, in a consistent pattern like ‘Smith-Family-001’, using your computer’s built-in file renaming tools — no extra software needed on either Windows or Mac.
What you need
- A folder of scanned photos already on your computer
- A Windows PC or a Mac (both have this built in)
- A few minutes, depending on how many photos are in the folder
Decide your naming pattern first
Decide on your naming pattern before you start, for example ‘Grandma-Album-1965-001’, since this is what every photo in the folder will be renamed to, with a number added automatically at the end. Make sure you are renaming a copy of your photos, not your only copy, in case you want to undo the change later.
How to rename the whole folder
- Open the folder of photos in File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac).
- Select all the photos in the folder: press Ctrl+A on Windows or Cmd+A on Mac.
- On Windows, right-click one of the selected photos and choose Rename, type your new name (e.g. ‘Smith-Family’), and press Enter — every photo will be renamed with that text plus an automatic number, like ‘Smith-Family (1)’, ‘Smith-Family (2)’, and so on.
- On Mac, right-click (or Control-click) the selected photos, choose Rename [number of] items, select ‘Format’ from the dropdown, choose a naming pattern with a starting number, type your base name, and click Rename.
- Wait for the renaming to finish — this can take a moment for a large folder.
- Open the folder again and scroll through to check the new names look right and are still in a sensible order.
Check the new names look right
Open the folder and confirm every photo has the new name pattern, with a number at the end, and that the photos still open normally when you double-click them. The order they appear in the folder should still roughly match the order they were in before, since most renaming tools keep the original order when numbering.
If some files don’t rename properly
If the numbers don’t come out in the order you expected, it is often because the files were not sorted the way you assumed before renaming — sort the folder by date or original filename first, then select and rename again. If a photo seems to have gone missing after renaming, check you are not looking in a different folder, since some renaming tools create a new folder rather than renaming in place.
Next step
Once your photos are renamed consistently, it is much easier to tag them by decade or group them by event, since a clear naming pattern makes it obvious at a glance which batch or collection each photo belongs to.
Sources and date checked
Researched from Microsoft’s and Apple’s own published file-renaming documentation, not a hands-on test performed for this article. Date checked: 22 September 2026.