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Got a bunch of files you want to rename, but don’t want to go through them each one by one? Windows provides more ways to do this than you may realize.

You can easily rename one or more files just with Windows Explorer, but you can do even more with the Command Prompt or PowerShell. Add in third-party renaming utilities, and the possibilities are endless. Let’s take a look at each option and how it works.

Rename Multiple Files in Windows Explorer

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Windows Explorer (known as File Explorer in Windows 10) is surprisingly powerful. You probably know how to rename a single file, but let’s start with the basics, since the advanced tricks build off them.

If you’re using your mouse, you have no less than three ways to select a file’s name and rename it. You can:

  • Click to select the file and then click the “Rename” button on the Home menu.
  • Click to select file and then click the name of the selected file.
  • Right-click the file and then select “Rename” on the context menu.

And if you prefer sticking with your keyboard, you can just use your arrow keys (or start typing the file name) to select a file and then hit F2 to select the file name.

Once you’ve got the file name selected—and you’ll notice only the file name itself is selected, not the extension—you can type a new file name.

When you’re done typing the file name, you can press Enter (or just click somewhere else) to save the new name.

Here’s where things get interesting: you can also hit the Tab key to automatically select the next file name in the folder so that you can immediately begin typing a new name for it. Keep hitting Tab and typing names this way and you can easily rename all the files in a folder if you’re so inclined.

If you’re renaming a bunch of files in the same folder and those files don’t need completely different names from one another, Windows provides an easier way to rename those files in batch. Start by selecting a bunch of files—you can hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple files at once, or Shift to select a range of files. When you’ve got the files selected, use one of the rename commands—the button on the Home menu, the command on the context menu, or just press F2. You’ll see that all the files remain selected, but the first one in the group gets its name highlighted so you can type a new name.

Type a new name for the file and then hit Enter or click somewhere else in the window. All the selected files are renamed using the name you just typed, and are appended with a number in parentheses to differentiate them.

Rename Multiple Files from the Command Prompt

If you need more power than that, you can use the rename or ren command in a Command Prompt window to one or more files. The command accepts wildcard characters like * and ? for matching multiple files, which can be helpful if you only want to rename a certain selection of files in a folder full of many.

The quickest way to open a Command Prompt window at your desired location is to first open the folder in File Explorer. From the “File” menu, point to “Open command prompt,” and then select “Open command prompt.”

To rename a single file, you can use the following command syntax:

The quotes are important if your file names contain any spaces. If they don’t, you won’t need the quotes. So, for example, to rename a file from “wordfile (1).docx” to “my word file (01).docx” you would use the following command:

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Since the ren command can address extensions, you can also use it to change the extensions of multiple files at once. Say, for example, you had a selection of .txt files that you wanted to turn into .html files. You could use the following command along with the * wildcard (which basically tells Windows that text of any length should be considered a match):

And while we’re on the subject of wildcards, you can also do some interesting things with the ? wildcard, which is used to stand in for any single character. Say, for example, you had a bunch of .html files that you wanted to turn into .htm files instead. You could use the following command to make the change:

This tells Windows to rename all files with the .html extension to use the same file name and same first three letters only of the file extension, which ends up cutting the “l” off of all the extensions in the folder.

RELATED:How to Write a Batch Script on Windows

And this only begins to address the kinds of command line wizardy you can get into if you want to build more complicated commands—or even batch scripts—by weaving other commands and conditionals into things. If you’re interested, the folks over at the Lagmonster forums have an excellent writeup on the subject.

Rename Multiple Files with PowerShell

PowerShell offers even more flexibility for renaming files in a command-line environment. Using PowerShell, you can pipe the output of one command—known as a “commandlet” in PowerShell terms—to another command, just like you can on Linux and other UNIX-like systems. The two important commands you’ll need are Dir, which lists the files in the current directory, and Rename-Item, which renames an item (a file, in this case). Pipe the output of Dir to Rename-Item and you’re in business.

The quickest way to open a PowerShell window at your desired location is to first open the folder in File Explorer. From the “File” menu, point to “Open Windows PowerShell,” and then select “Open Windows Powershell.”

First, let’s look at renaming a single file. For that, you would use the following syntax:

So, for example, to rename a file from “wordfile.docx” to “My Word File.docx” you would use the following commandlet:

Easy enough. But the real power in PowerShell comes from the ability to pipe commandlets together and some of the conditional switches supported by the rename-item commandlet. Say, for example, we had a bunch of files named “wordfile (1).docx”, “wordfile (2).docx”, and so on.

Say we wanted to replace the space in those file names with an underscore so that the file names contain no spaces. We could use the following commandlet:

The dir part of that commandlet lists all the files in the folder and pipes them (that’s the symbol) to the rename-item commandlet. The $_.name part stands in for each of the files getting piped. The -replace switch indicates that a replacement is going to happen. The rest of the commandlet just signifies that any space ( ' ' ) should be replaced by an underscore ( '_' ).

And now, our files look the way we want.

RELATED:Geek School: Learn How to Automate Windows with PowerShell

Free Batch File Rename Utility

As you might expect, PowerShell offers tremendous power when it comes to naming your files and we’re only scratching the surface here. For example, the rename-item commandlet also offers features like a -recurse switch that can apply the commandlet to files in a folder and all folders nested inside that folder, a -force switch that can force renaming for files that are locked or otherwise unavailable, and even a -whatif switch that describes what would happen if the commandlet was executed (without actually executing it). And, of course, you can also build more complicated commandlet structures that even include IF/THEN logic. You can learn more about PowerShell in general from our Geek School guide, and learn more about the rename-item commandlet from Microsoft’s TechNet Library.

Rename Multiple Files Using a Third Party App

RELATED:Bulk Rename Tool is a Lightweight but Powerful File Renaming Tool

If you need a powerful way to rename multiple files at once and you’re just not up for mastering the Command Prompt or PowerShell commands, you can always turn to a third-party utility. There are countless renaming apps our there—and many of them are good—but we have two clear favorites: Bulk Rename Utility and AdvancedRenamer.

How to Use Bulk Rename Utility

Bulk Rename Utility has a cluttered and somewhat intimidating interface, but it exposes the huge number of options you’d normally only get with regular expressions and complicated command-line options.

After installing the tool, launch it, navigate to the files you want to rename, and select them.

Change options in one or more of the many available panels, and you’ll see a preview of your changes appear in the “New Name” column where your files are listed. In this example, I’ve made changes to four panels, which are now highlighted in orange so it’s easier to tell what I’ve changed. I’ve told the utility to change the name of all files to “Word File” and to use title case. I’ve appended the date the file was created in the YMD format. And I’ve also added an automatic file number that appears at the end of the file name, starts at one, increments by one, and is separated from the file name by an underscore. And that’s only a tiny bit of what you can do with the Bulk Rename Utility. When you’re satisfied with how your new file names will look, all you have to do is click the “Rename” button.

And as you can see, the utility handled my simple requests with ease.

How to Use AdvancedRenamer

Our other favorite renaming tool, AdvancedRenamer, also exposes a huge number of renaming methods, but instead of presenting them all as panels in the interface, it asks that you use a pretty simple but powerful syntax to create renaming methods. It’s not hard to learn and they have good support, along with examples. The tool does sport a much friendlier interface and supports setting up advanced batch jobs so you can combine multiple renaming methods and apply them to large numbers of files. You can also save renaming methods you create for later use.

In the example below, I’ve created a renaming method using the following syntax:

This tells AdvancedRenamer to name all my files “Word File” and to add the creation date in the YMD format (separating each portion by an underscore). It also adds an incremental file number in parentheses and separated by an additional underscore.

And as you can see, my files have been renamed just the way I want. AdvancedRenamer has a bit steeper learning curve than Bulk File Renamer, but the reward for that is that you get much finer control over your file names.

Have other ways to rename files in Windows we haven’t covered? Be sure to leave us a comment and let us know about it.

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On Windows 10, the process to rename a single file is easy, but it can quickly become troublesome when trying to change the name (or extension) to a long list of files within a folder.

You can always install third-party tools to ease the process, but Windows 10 includes various tools to quickly change the name of files using File Explorer as well as using Command Prompt and PowerShell.

Bulk File Renamer Freeware

In this Windows 10 guide, we'll walk you through three ways to rename multiple files, including changing the extension, without the need to resource to third-party tools.

How to rename multiple files using File Explorer

While you can choose from multiple methods to rename files, using File Explorer is perhaps the easiest way to accomplish the task.

Renaming multiple files one at a time

To quickly rename multiple files with different names using the 'Tab' key, use these steps:

  1. Open File Explorer.
  2. Locate the folder with the files to rename.
  3. Click the View tab.

  4. Select the Details view.

  5. Select the first file in the folder.
  6. Click the Home tab.

  7. Click the Rename button.

    Quick tip: You can also press the F2 button, right-click the files and select the Rename option, or click the file once and slowly click the file name again to trigger the rename action.

  8. Type the new file name.
  9. Press the Tab key to jump to trigger the rename action for the next file on the list.
  10. Type the new file name.
  11. Press the Tab key again to jump to trigger the next rename.

Renaming multiple files at once

To rename multiple files in bulk with the same name structure, use these steps:

  1. Open File Explorer.
  2. Locate the folder with the files to rename.
  3. Click the View tab.

  4. Select the Details view.

  5. Click the Home tab.

  6. Click the Select all button.

    Quick tip: You can also use the Ctrl + A keyboard shortcut to quickly select all files. You can press and hold the Ctrl key and then click with the mouse the files to rename. Or you can even choose the first file, press and hold the Shift key, and then click the last file to select a group.

  7. Click the Rename button.

  8. Type the new file name and press Enter.

Once you complete the steps, all the selected files will be renamed using the same scheme. However, you'll notice that they will use a different number between parentheses. For example, summer_trip_2019 (1).jpg and summer_trip_2019 (2).jpg.

If you made a mistake, you could use the Ctrl + Z keyboard shortcut to undo the changes. Alternatively, you can click the menu button from the top-left corner (on the title bar of File Explorer), and select the Undo option.

How to rename multiple files using Command Prompt

If you're comfortable using commands, you can use Command Prompt to change the name of one or multiple files in bulk.

Renaming single file

To rename one file with Command Prompt, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for Command Prompt and click the top result to open the app.

  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

    This example opens the 'Documents' folder:

    cd %USERPROFILE%Documents

  4. Type the following command to rename a file and press Enter:

    ren 'OLD-FILE-NAME.EXTENSION' 'NEW-FILENAME.EXTENSION'

    In the command, the quotation marks are only required if the name includes spaces.

    This example rename the file to 'summer_trip_2019_notes.txt':

    ren 's_trip_19_notes.txt' 'summer_trip_2019_notes.txt'

Renaming multiple files

To rename multiple files in bulk with the same name structure with Command Prompt, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for Command Prompt and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to rename multiple files in bulk and press Enter:

    ren *.FILE-EXTENSION ???-FILE-NAME.*

    In the command, the asterisk (*) is a wildcard that specifies the ren command to rename everything with a '.jpg' extension. The question mark (?) is also a wildcard, but it represents a character of the original file name.

    This example renames all '.jpg' files leaving the first three characters (which works as a unique identifier to avoid duplication) and appends '-hikingTrails' to the name:

    ren *.jpg ???-hikingTrails.*

Trimming multiple file names

To make long file names shorter with Command Prompt, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for Command Prompt and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to make file names shorter and press Enter:

    ren *.* CHARACTER-COUNT.*

    In the command, the asterisk (*) matches all the file names and extensions in the folder, and the question marks (?) indicates how many characters to use for the new file name.

    This example trims the file names longer than five characters:

    ren *.* ?????.*

    If the file name is less than five characters, then the name will not change. (If you want to make the file name longer add extra question marks.)

Modifying multiple file names

To rename part of the file name on similar files, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for Command Prompt and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to rename part of file name and press Enter:

    ren OLD-FILE-NAME-PART*.* NEW-FILENAME-PART*.*

    This example renames names files start with 'summer_trip_2019' to 'vacation_2019_':

    ren summer_trip_2019*.* vacation_2019_*.*

Changing file extension

To change the file extension to another compatible extension, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for Command Prompt and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to change the file extension and press Enter:

    ren *.OLD-EXTENSION *.NEW-EXTENSION

    This example changes the extension from '.txt' to '.doc' compatible with Microsoft Word for the files in the folder:

    ren *.txt *.doc

    This example changes only extension of a single file from '.txt' to '.doc':

    ren beach_trip_notes.txt beach_trip_notes.doc

Renaming specific extension file names

The instructions outlined above will rename every file within the location. However, if you want to rename only a group of files with a particular format, you need to omit the asterisk (*) and specify the target extension in the command.

To rename files with a specific file extension, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for Command Prompt and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to change the extension for a group of files and press Enter:

    ren FILE-NAME*.EXTENSION FILE-NAME*.EXTENSION

    This example only renames images with a '.jpg' extension:

    ren vacation_2019_*.jpg summer_trip_2019*.jpg

After you complete the steps, Command Prompt will rename the files using the settings that you specified in the command.

How to rename multiple files using PowerShell

On Windows 10, PowerShell is a powerful scripting tool, which similar to Command Prompt, allows you to rename files virtually any way you want. These instructions, we'll walk you through the most common scenarios to rename one as well as various files at once.

Renaming single file

To rename a single file using PowerShell, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.

  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

    This example opens the 'Documents' folder:

    cd Documents

  4. Type the following command to change the name of a single file and press Enter:

    Rename-Item 'OLD-FILE-NAME.EXTENSION' 'NEW-FILE-NAME.EXTENSION'

    In the command, the quotation marks are only required if the name includes spaces.

    This example renames the file to 'beach_trip_notes.txt':

    Rename-Item 'surfing_trip_notes.txt' 'beach_trip_notes.txt'

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Renaming multiple files in bulk

To rename multiple files in bulk when the name structure isn't important, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to rename multiple files in bulk and press Enter:

    Dir %{Rename-Item $_ -NewName ('NEW-FILE-NAME{0}.EXTENSION' -f $nr++)}

    This example renames images with a '.jpg' extension using the same ('beach_trip_2019') naming scheme and appends a different number at the end of the name:

    Dir %{Rename-Item $_ -NewName ('beach_trip_2019{0}.jpg' -f $nr++)}

Trimming multiple file names

To make file names shorter, or trim part of the names by an N number of characters, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to rename files using shorter names and press Enter:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name.substring(0,$_.BaseName.length-N) + $_.Extension}

    In the command update '$_.BaseName.length-N' by changing the value of 'N' to specify the number of characters that you want to remove.

    This example will trim the name of your files by eight characters:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name.substring(0,$_.BaseName.length-8) + $_.Extension}

Deleting part of the name from multiple files

To remove part of the file name on multiple files with PowerShell, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to remove part of the file name and press Enter:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace 'OLD-FILE-NAME-PART','}

    This example removes the word 'trip' from the name of all files in the folder:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace 'trip','}

Replacing part of the name from multiple files

To rename the same part of the file name on similar files, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to replace part of file name and press Enter:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace 'OLD-FILE-NAME-PART,'NEW-FILE-NAME-PART'}

    This example replaces the word 'beach_' for 'surfing_trip' of all the files that contain the word 'tower' as part of the file name:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace 'beach_','surfing_trip'}

Removing spaces from multiple files

Spaces on file names can sometimes cause problems, especially when using a command terminal. If you have files using spaces in the title, you can modify the name to include a visual separator, such as dash or underscore symbol.

To remove and replace spaces with underscores, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to remove spaces from file name and press Enter:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName { $_.Name -replace 'SPACE','SEPARATOR' }

    This example replaces spaces with underscores in all files:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName { $_.Name -replace ' ','_' }

Changing file extension

To change the file extension for a bunch of files with PowerShell, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to change the extension on files and press Enter:

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName { [io.path]::ChangeExtension($_.name, 'NEW-EXTENSION') }

    This example changes any file extension to '.doc':

    Dir Rename-Item -NewName { [io.path]::ChangeExtension($_.name, 'doc') }

Renaming specific extension file names

The instructions outlined above will rename every file within the location. However, if you want to rename a particular file format, such as documents, images, or videos, then you can use the '-filter' option.

To change the names of a specific file format, use these steps:

  1. Open Start.
  2. Search for PowerShell and click the top result to open the app.
  3. Navigate to the folder with the files to rename.

  4. Type the following command to rename files with a specific extension and press Enter:

    Dir -filter *.EXTENSION %{Rename-Item $_ -NewName ('NEW-FILE-NAME{0}.EXTENSION' -f $nr++)}

    This example renames only files that include the '.jpg' extension:

    Dir -filter *.jpg %{Rename-Item $_ -NewName ('beach_trip_{0}.jpg' -f $nr++)}

Once you complete the steps, PowerShell will rename the files of a specific extension using the name that you specified in the command.

Although these commands have been tested to work correctly, it's always recommended that you perform a test run before trying to rename the original files.

More Windows 10 resources

For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources: