Mac: Rename all files names in a directory to lower case

Just like my last post, I was working with a directory of about 1000 files. There were all sorts of problems with the way they were named. Anyone who is used a *nix type system will know that “.jpg”, “.Jpg”, “.JPG” are all very separate things. To solve the issue I was having I needed to rename all of the files in the directory to lowercase.

I fired up my friend the Mac terminal and ran the following command:

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$(echo $i|tr A-Z a-z)"; done

The code loops through each of the files in the current directory and renames it to the lowercase equivalent. fast, simple, elegant. Major time saver.

Mac: Converting a directory of images into JPG files

Recently I was presented with a problem where I had a directory of about 1000 graphic files of mixed formats (png, gif, bmp, jpg), and I needed to convert them all to jpg files.

I tried various solutions but I ended using the following command in my Mac’s terminal.

mkdir jpegs; sips -s format jpeg *.* --out jpgs

This command creates directory called “jpgs”, and converts all of the files in the current directory into .jpg format, and moves them into the newly created “jpgs” direcotry.

It truly saved the day.