Got a great question from Carla this morning and thought I would pop in with a solution.  I hope you all know how much your questions help me in class – there are things I just take for granted and forget to share so questions help me remember to teach that particular part!

Here's Carla's question:

I've run into an UGH! while importing & would like to know if there's a LR solution. When moving my keyworded kits into the main designer folders occasionally I run into the "same" name issue for some kit items (not every item in a kit but maybe one or two elements). No worries, I pull back the entire kit and rename using the folder name as part of the file name, then move it to the main designer folder. No problem… until I realized the UGH! During the conversion process from .png to .tif, those items are put into a folder named TIFF instead the kit folder. Last night I discovered that those items when using the rename process, are renamed with TIFF as the folder name instead of the kit folder name.

There are a few more options with renaming in Lightroom that I think you (and many others) will find very helpful.  You can also find more about this topic in this video.  

Keep in mind as I share this with you that I am teaching you a "how-to" that you can apply in several different ways – with new kits, photos, items, etc. 

So after you have finally moved all your item into Lightroom (including converted PNG files), you will keyword items by Designer and Kit.  At this point we move everything from kits into their master designer folder.

What happens if the designer already has a file called, "KJL_PinkPaper" but they really are two different pieces of paper?  This is where file renaming in Lightroom comes in.

For example, this cute word art and hybrid box from Kristi's Creations in this month's Daily Digi files (shhh!  It's a bit of sneak peek because they haven't revealed it yet on TDD and I only have my latest downloads to show you):

  I love this cute spring word art but I know if I collect more from this designer with the simple names of the files, I might have some issues.  So the first thing I want to do is isolate the kits. 

• In your keywords panel, scroll down to the name of the kit and click the arrow next to the item count to bring up all the items in the thumbnail grid.  Once you have the kit in your grid, press CTRL/CMD + A to select all the thumbnails.

• Scroll down to the Metadata Panel and click on the button with three lines next to the File Name field.

• Next you will see a dialog box. The top of the box will tell you how many files you selected to rename (i.e. 47 for this kit).   It will also show you an example using the custom renaming you used previously to rename other files on the first file of the group selected.  This can be deceiving because when you are dealing with kit files some have the name of the kit but others are converted PNG files and will be inside a TIFF folder – so they would literally be named TIFF_Filename.  Let me show you how to change that.

• Click the drop down menu by Preset and select Edit.  This will bring up the Filename Template Editor.  Here is where the magic happens.  In this example you can see I was working with photos last night so my custom file naming is more about using the folder name and a sequence number.  We need to change that for supplies. 

• Another note I want to make on this dialog – all these items with INSERT buttons are things you can inset directly into the custom filename box by simply clicking the Insert button next to them.  However, keep in mind that just because you can add lots of info to the filename doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

• You will want to click directly in the box with the blue labels.  From here you can highlight what is already in there, delete it and then start over.

• First thing you will want to do is type the name of the kit and add an underscore ( _ ) at the end of the kit name.   

• Under Image Name Click the Insert button next to Original filename. 

• When you are finished click Done and Lightroom will process and rename all your folders with your new Custom File Names.

There you go – renamed just as you like them and ready to move into the Designer folder without any issues!

Hope that helps!