how to rename image files

jennyp

Hi everyone I need some help.

I have a directory of images which are named something like this:

1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg
7.jpg
8.jpg
9.jpg
10.jpg
11.jpg
12.jpg

A script I'm working on deletes (unlinks) just one of these - say 3.jpg, leaving:

1.jpg
2.jpg
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg
7.jpg
8.jpg
9.jpg
10.jpg
11.jpg
12.jpg

What I want to do is to add on to the end of this script a routine which renames the images left, in a way that will preserve the best sequence of names. So that, for the example above, the image names get renamed so that the names would be:

1.jpg (was 1.jpg)
2.jpg (was 2.jpg)
3.jpg (was 4.jpg)
4.jpg (was 5.jpg)
5.jpg (was 6.jpg)
6.jpg (was 7.jpg)
7.jpg (was 8.jpg)
8.jpg (was 9.jpg)
9.jpg (was 10.jpg)
10.jpg (was 11.jpg)
11.jpg (was 12.jpg)

I've been tweaking my script all over the place with no good results, so I thought I'd see what everyone else's approach would be.

Thanks in advance!

bradgrafelman

Well, I'd use [man]glob/man to get an array of all '*.jpg' files (assuming there are no other JPEG files in this directory), removing the '.' and '..' entries of course.

Then, use something like this:

for($num=1,$i=0; isset($array_from_glob[$i]); $i++,$num++)
   if($array_from_glob[$i] != "$num.jpg")
      rename($array_from_glob[$i], "$num.jpg")

NOTE: This code is untested. Of course, no one copies and pastes code snippets directly from a forum into a production environment, but I just thought I'd warn you anyway.

jennyp

Thanks for that pointer. In the end, in view of all the stuff about whether rename will work/rename/and/or delete on whichever *nix server you're using I've been reading about, I used a conservative but long winded approach I guess by unlinking the target image, using regular arrays to copy the images left to a temp folder, unlinking all the originals and then renaming the temp ones back, and the order seems nicely preserved. It happens very quickly so that seems Ok. But thanks 🙂 I must make the acquaintance of the great glob as I haven't used it before! - perhaps it would be more appropriate here?