I have a collection of related photos stored on my PC. The filenames were “ugly” – standard file names coming from the photo camera. I would like to rename them into a file containing the date when the photo was shoot, e.g. 2011.07.21.jpg. There is an excellent commandline tool to do just that – renrot. It’s packaged for Debian & Ubuntu so to install it, I’ve simply run:

apt-get install renrot

Then, in the directory that contains my photos I’ve run:

renrot -n "%Y.%m.%d" *

-n option allows for specifying the template used for renaming the files – it is year, month and day separated with dots in my case. If the tool creates more files, you can remove the originals:

rm *orig

Refer to manual page for the full options!