[Guide] Mass Renaming Images to Merge Picture Packs

[HHUK]

With the influx of new picture packs that'll be dropping soon it's going to be really hard to choose between your favourites and nobody has time to sit and compare individual characters before dropping them into your picture folder.

For this guide I'll use Microsoft Powertoys, a free official extension for Windows.  More powerful unofficial programs exist like Bulk Rename Utility and Advanced Renamer but today I'll focus on Powertoys as it's official Microsoft software. Once you've got Powertoys installed you'll be able to access more options from your right click menu.  

Here I've unzipped a picture pack to it's own folder, I've pressed CTRL + A to select all of the images, then I'll use shift + right click to open a longer version of the right click menu. Then click Rename with PowerRename.

Inside PowerRename I told it to search for (.*).gif which means any gif selected, tick "use regular expressions". For the replace option I've told it to take the existing filename and add _EdJames on the end so I can remember who made those renders. That'd read as $1_EdJames.gif ($1 representing the existing filename). Click apply and it'll rename the lot, you can then drop them into your existing TEW picture folder.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/powerrename

Microsoft have a page about the syntax used if you wanna make your own fancier naming format.

Here's an example use case, you've signed a guy, you can open up their character info, compare their pictures and choose the cooler Daniel.

Powertoys also has a batch image resizer with customisable presets which I imagine some of you will find useful! 

[benjirino]

Was not aware this existed and this will make things a lot smoother, thanks @HHUK!

[christmas_ape]

Do you know if there's a way on this to do the opposite and get rid of part of the file name? For example all of @WalterSobchak renders have alt5/6/7 at the end of them. Am I right in thinking if I was able to delete those bits, when I then transferred them to my picture file it would let me overwrite the default pictures and make these show up in game?

 

I could be over thinking this and there might be an easier way. 

 

[HHUK]

It probably wouldn't be worth doing it for that purpose, Windows won't allow files of the exact same name to exist in the same folder, it'd chop off the alt1, alt2 etc but it'd put a number like (1) (2) (3) on the end of all your files. Somebody clever enough could probably figure it but I'm not that great at regular expressions.

[christmas_ape]

8 minutes ago, HHUK said:

It probably wouldn't be worth doing it for that purpose, Windows won't allow files of the exact same name to exist in the same folder, it'd chop off the alt1, alt2 etc but it'd put a number like (1) (2) (3) on the end of all your files. Somebody clever enough could probably figure it but I'm not that great at regular expressions.

But I guess that's the point right? If I want one set of pictures to overwrite another set I want them to have the same name, but right now they all have alt5 on so I'd have to manually pick for the game to use that one for each worker. But if they had the same I could skip a lot of work. 

Sorry if I'm not explaining it clearly. I've confused myself... 

[BigDPW]

1 hour ago, christmas_ape said:

But I guess that's the point right? If I want one set of pictures to overwrite another set I want them to have the same name, but right now they all have alt5 on so I'd have to manually pick for the game to use that one for each worker. But if they had the same I could skip a lot of work. 

Sorry if I'm not explaining it clearly. I've confused myself... 

You could use this tool as follows to do what you are trying to do.

1) move the current/original pics to another folder

2) paste in the new/updated pictures (after renaming them to the correct names en masse if needed)

3) paste the original pics that you have moved out of the people folder back into the folder and allow windows to rename any that are "duplicate names"

 

That method will get you the updates with the correct file names and all of the originals as "alts" that you can still access easily in your PEOPLE folder.

Edited August 3 by BigDPW

[christmas_ape]

8 minutes ago, BigDPW said:

You could use this tool as follows to do what you are trying to do.

1) move the current/original pics to another folder

2) paste in the new/updated pictures (after renaming them to the correct names en masse if needed)

3) paste the original pics that you have moved out of the people folder back into the folder and allow windows to rename any that are "duplicate names"

 

That method will get you the updates with the correct file names and all of the originals as "alts" that you can still access easily in your PEOPLE folder.

Cheers, you're right but it's the step 2 where the issue is. Renaming them all en masse that I'm struggling with.