The old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” holds very true for Joseph Clark. As an appraiser for CAC Appraisals, he was familiar with the arduous and time-consuming task of renaming digital images of collision damage, something most insurance companies require. There were days when he sometimes spent hours renaming upwards of 200 images based on how many cars he wrote estimates for.
Insurers require that the images be renamed from their default camera naming sequence to a description that says something about the image itself. This task typically falls on an appraiser or auto body estimator and can take a lot of time, especially if you take 100 or more photos a day. In Clark’s case, all the images that came out of his camera always had a default label of SAM001.jpg, SAM002.jpg, etc., so he had to rename them. But there were more problems than just renaming them.
“There were also spelling issues all the time when manually renaming images,” Clark says. “With the [Image Rename It] program, you only type your names one time, making sure you’ve spelled them correctly, and then with two fast clicks, an image is renamed and sent to a destination folder automatically when the destination folder option is used. The insurance companies always want a description on the images, so it is quicker and easier to know what that image is for at a glance.”
Clark himself is not a programmer, so he had someone else write Image Rename It under his direction. It took many months, a few thousand dollars and many tries to find a programmer who understood exactly what was needed.
“Money spent on failed programmers was hard to swallow,” Clark admits.
Clark approximates that the time savings is 40% over renaming each picture manually by typing a new name. Over time, a user can get even faster, cutting the renaming time down 60% or 70%. As an independent appraiser, Clark uses the program every day. He can add to the database with no limit and even do so on the fly right from the front-end user interface — which makes the program highly customizable. Users can add, delete, edit or rename any part of the database. They can even create a whole new database from scratch while leaving the existing data intact. They can also add arrows, circles and squares to their images while renaming them. There is even a feature that allows the name to be placed right on the lower edge of the images when that feature is turned on in settings.
While this program is highly useful for the collision repair and insurance industries, it is also applicable to the medical industry, construction, real estate, police, fire departments, plants, tree and nature imaging and any other businesses that use imaging as a means to catalogue pictures for business needs.
For more information on Image Rename It, click here.
