Changing many image names in Lightoom 4

I have about 500 images, jpeg, raw and xmp that need changing in a range of folders

 

x100_20120702_DSCF0293.jpg inserting an 'A' -> x100_20120702_ADSCF0293.jpg

 

is there a way to avoid doing this one by one?

I see no easy way of doing this in LR. Using other software might do the job: perhaps Irfanview can do this or you can use some good old DOS rename commands but this will distort your LR catalog so you run from one problem into another. Also search for LR rename plugins. There are a few around that will do renaming.

Apart from that, I don't know why you'd want to change the names. Can't you reach the same goal in another way?

For later exporting to Shutterfly, I often rename sports pix. ie.

• Tennis, all the pix prefixed by playing order. For 1st singles they are prefixed by S1, 2nd doubles by D2. This groups the pix of those player for their parents to easily find them, vs. spread all over the album as it was with an un-renamed pix file. This also makes it very obvious when I shoot more of a few players than the others...oh well.
  

• Volleyball, I prefix the pix with their jersey number. So similar to tennis, their parents can easily find all the pix of their kid, grouped together, and not spread all over the album.
  

Picasa drives me nuts, because after renaming (actually save the pix as a new name), it somehow remembers the original order, not the regrouped order. So I have to use another app to review the pix (as renamed and grouped) before uploading to Shutterfly.

Search "bulk rename utility" download "Bulkrenameutility". - It is an awesome piece of code, if you manage to have all renaming candidates in the same folder. Works well enough for me, so I didn't bother to try alternatives.

I have no clue how to do the chore in Lightroom, but using the tiny external program is probably faster?

Edited November 8, 2017 by Jochen

I'll second Jochen's choice. Bulk rename utility is a very powerful tool. It'll do everything you could ever want to do to a file name. Play around with it a bit first.