I am trying to create a video of some photos I numbered them thinking that when I imported them into Pitivi they would appear in numerical order. Not so. They sort alphabetically 1,10,11,100 instead of 1,2,3,4.

So to get the result I wanted I created a script to copy the images to a new location with a new alphabetically sortable name (AA, AB, AC… ZZ):

Step 1 – was to get a list of the images to rename

cd /path/to/images
ls -1  | sort -n > filelist

Step 2 – Open filelist in and copy into LibreOffice calc and create a script containing the commands you need. There are a million ways to do this but I find using calc / excel is familiar and easy

#!/bin/bash
mkdir renamed
cp "1_RIMG0001.jpg" "renamed/AA-1_RIMG0001.jpg"
cp "2_RIMG0002a.jpg" "renamed/AB-2_RIMG0002a.jpg"
cp "3_RIMG0003.jpg" "renamed/AC-3_RIMG0003.jpg"
cp "4_Picture_001.jpg" "renamed/AD-4_Picture_001.jpg"
cp "5_Picture_024.jpg" "renamed/AE-5_Picture_024.jpg"
cp "6_Picture_017.jpg" "renamed/AF-6_Picture_017.jpg"
cp "7_Picture_035.jpg" "renamed/AG-7_Picture_035.jpg"
cp "8a_RIMG0001.jpg" "renamed/AH-8a_RIMG0001.jpg"
cp "8_Picture_061.jpg" "renamed/AI-8_Picture_061.jpg"
cp "9_RIMG0004_001.jpg" "renamed/AJ-9_RIMG0004_001.jpg"
cp "10_RIMG0007_001.jpg" "renamed/AK-10_RIMG0007_001.jpg"
cp "11_RIMG0005_002.jpg" "renamed/AL-11_RIMG0005_002.jpg"
cp "12_RIMG000_2.jpg" "renamed/AM-12_RIMG000_2.jpg"
cp "13_RIMG0001_004.jpg" "renamed/AN-13_RIMG0001_004.jpg"
cp "14_RIMG0045.jpg" "renamed/AO-14_RIMG0045.jpg"
cp "15_RIMG0001_005.jpg" "renamed/AP-15_RIMG0001_005.jpg"

Once you have the commands created copy them from the spreadsheet into a text file in the same directory as your images and run it

gedit rename.sh # enter the commands into a textfile and save it
chmod +x rename.sh # make it executeable
./rename.sh # run the script
ls renamed/ | head -n 5 # check your results
AA-1_RIMG0001.jpg
AB-2_RIMG0002a.jpg
AC-3_RIMG0003.jpg
AD-4_Picture_001.jpg
AE-5_Picture_024.jpg