The ‘Pink Army’ or as it is called in India ‘Swasthya Samvedana Sena’ project continues to teach me more about the hidden tools that exist in this vast world of digital spectrum. So, the task at hand was pure repetitive work of rearranging 26 GB of media rich content in a structure suitable for our Pink Army mobile application which we have launched in District of Sabarkantha in Gujarat in the Public Health Segment.
The healthcare content was a combination of powerpoint presentations and videos. The first step was to convert these presentations into images of PNG format. The method suggested was that I open each presentation and then saving it as a PNG image which then automatically converts the file into a set of images in one folder. This is impressive! But, this can be an arduous task when you have more than 200 presentations to convert.
I had one look at the number of presentations on a Saturday night and thought I was doomed. I cursed my luck and hoped that there must be a solution for this on the web. And guess what, the web never seems to fail the ones in need! I found this tool where a user can upload their files and it automatically converts the presentations into images in batches and gives it the same names as the folder which makes identification and rearrangement into respective folders easier. Immediately, I got cracking on this, loaded each folder onto it and went on to continue to eat my awesome dinner with movie while my files converted automatically
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Conversion done, now back to manual work. It took about two hours putting all the converted content into theirrespective folders. Job half done. Next task was to rename those PNG images in a sequential order. More Curses!! The only way I knew to rename a file was to right click and rename it. This was not going to work as the number of PNG images were just too much. I prayed this time that there must be some genius out there in this digital world who would have come up with a better solution. And there was!
Thanks to this write up on this link-
http://www.howtogeek.com/111859/how-to-batch-rename-files-in-windows-4-ways-to-rename-multiple-files/ by Chris Hoffman
Being a non techie, my curiosity led me to try out the first method in the above article just to see what magic it creates. But, then keeping in mind the tight timeframes and the fear of breaking my computer led me to use the third method of Bulk renaming software. The UI of this software didn’t help me much at all to initially use it .Thanks again to the clear explanation in the above article that saved my ass.
I was lucky that my prior tool extracted the PNG images with names which had sequential numbers at the end. Next, I loaded all my PNG image files, folder wise(ran into thousands) onto the panel, reduced the strings till I got them in sequential order and hit RENAME! And Lo it was done in a jiffy! I got furiously cracking on this and was done in about the next three hours with this task.
So, my weekend which I thought was going to be a nightmare doing work turned out to be pretty interesting for me. Small discoveries, but for a noob its like hitting a gold mine!
More noob discoveries to come… 🙂
