I have a large collection of images on a thumb drive and been working on renaming many of the older ones into a more standardized naming scheme. I am doing this to better organize the collection (and make the file name easier to read/understand) which involves having the first letter of each word capitalized. However, some files are all lower case while others are all upper case (or even a mixture of cases). When I try to ‘rename’ them within my scheme the changes do not take effect and the file name revers back to the original format. The workaround requires ‘renaming’ the file twice. The first time renaming the file add an extra character (I usually just add an ! to the front of the file name and fix the case issues too). Since you are making a change to the file name (adding an extra character) other than changing the case your changes will take effect. Now, you will need to ‘rename’ again to remove the extra character So let’s say I have a file named elgurutech.txt but I want to change it to ElGuruTexh.txt; If I try to rename the file to “ElGuruTexh.txt” windows will ignore my rename and the file will remain named as elgurutech.txt; To ‘fix this’ I need to:
- Rename it to “!ElGuruTexh.txt”; the rename will take since something else beside the case has changed in the file name.
- Now, I will need to go back and rename again, removing the ‘!’ from the name to get my desired ElGuruTexh.txt file name.
This is not an issue isolated to Windows 11 (or even Windows 10 for that matter) but older versions of Windows with a drive setup with NTFS (New Technology File System) which is case-insensitive. A file system governs file organization and access. Microsoft has used for Windows (and MS DOS) FAT and NTSF; Linux uses EXT and Mac use APFS. So since NTFS is case-insensitive Windows ignores the cases within the file name. Windows ‘thinks’ you did not change the file name if all you are doing is changing the case.
NTFS has been used since Windows XP (October 2001) and Windows 2000 a variant of Windows NT (now branded as Windows Sever) in December 1999. Since Windows XP (and 2000) used NTFS these were the first versions of Windows that removed the old “8.3” file name rule/restriction that us ‘old techies’ were used to from the MS DOS, Windows 3.0/3.1 and even Windows 95/98 series days. FAT (File Allocation Table) 16 (Windows 3.0/3.1) or 32 (released in 1996 and being supported on 1996 and later releases of Windows 95) was the file system used and a file could not have more than 8 characters in the ‘name’ (the portion to the left of the ‘.’) with a 3 character extension (to the right of the ‘.’) and filenames would ALWAYS be uppercase. Oh the horrors of being limited to 8 charters in your file name!
