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Multiple Renaming or Duplication

You can access Rename and Duplicate from the Edit menu (or the Context menu) or use the shortcuts F2 and Ctrl-D respectively. If more than one item is currently selected, the Multiple Rename dialog will appear (or Multiple Duplicate: the only difference is its title. From now on I'll just refer to Rename).

The Multiple Rename dialog, in Mepis The dialog provides three different ways to generate a new name for each item; you can use all or any of these. Notice that the Regex section is turned off by default, and Appending/Prepending is optional. Incrementing however will always happen automatically if it's needed to prevent a name-clash.




A more realistic example: Your digital camera names each picture 0001.jpg, 0002.jpg etc. You've stored 100 of these pictures in a directory, and you'd like to rename them '2013 Holiday 1.jpg', '2013 Holiday 2.jpg' etc. Select all the pictures and press F2 to get the dialog. Click the 'Use a Regular Expression' tickbox. In the 'Replace' box put [[:digit:]]*.jpg and in the 'With' box 2013 Holiday .jpg. Then set the 'Increment starting with' control to '1' (unless you want the first picture to be number 0) and untick 'Only if needed' (otherwise the first picture will be unnumbered). Click OK and a 'Confirm' dialog will appear, showing the old and new names. This gives you a chance to try again if it wasn't just as you wanted, as well as OK and Cancel.
What is happening? First the RegEx renames all the pictures '2013 Holiday .jpg'. The Increment section then adds a number from 1 to 100 between the second space and the '.' to make the name unique. (Yes, I know there are other ways to have done this, but this one is easy to understand.)