I've been trying to sort this one out without much success and its likely I'm missing something. I'd appreciate any help.

There are some photos in a directory C:\path\to\dirname. Is there any way to rename the photos using as prefix the name of the last directory in the path? The filenames will be of the form DIRNAME_rest_of_filename.ext. Using the command below was not successful:

exiftool "-filename=%d_%2c.%e" dirname

Many thanks in advance.

pdi

This is a bit tricky, but possible. First I'll show you the command line, then I'll explain how it works:

The "%-.1d" takes all of the directory name but the last character (which is the slash "/"). Without the trailing slash, the last directory name becomes part of the filename. (See the -w option documentation for details on how these format modifiers work.)

But a side-effect is that all files will be moved to their parent directories, since a file with path "a/b/c.jpg" will get its name set to "a/b_c.jpg". So the "-directory=%d" argument is added to override the file directory with the original directory of the file.

In your example, you used "%c" instead of "%f". That may be intentional, and will work, but will give the file a number instead of using the file name as you seem to want from your description.

I hope this helps.

- Phil