More RegEx renaming in Adobe Bridge

More examples of using Batch Rename RegEx in Bridge using Regular Expressions…

1. Find year/month in yyyy-mm format at the beginning of a filename:

^[0-9]{4}-[0-1][0-9]-

(Remove the caret symbol ‘^‘ if you’re searching for it anywhere in the filename)

2. Use brackets to group the filenames into separate chunks for renaming:

Each pair of brackets creates a new numbered “backreference” that you can use in the new name.  Here’s a really simple example…

Here I’m wanting to replace any 3 characters that appear in-between “hello-” and “-friend” with “new”…

Current name: hello-old-friend.jpg

Find: (hello-)(.{3})(-friend)

Replace: $1new$3

Result: hello-new-friend.jpg

Above we’ve set three groups using three pairs of brackets. The first group becomes  $1, the second $2… you get the picture. Obviously this isn’t so useful as it’s so specific it would only work on one file. For this to work on many files you’d use a wildcard ‘(.*)‘ in the find box as below…

3. Split file name at a marker (remove all characters before a set unique/special character)

Example – have to supply images to devs named only by numerical ID (don’t ask) but want to keep a descriptive name on the PSD.

So named the PSD something like this: “My-nice-name#12345.psd” – need to deliver “12345.jpg”.

NB this only works if the separating character (#) that splits the two parts of the name only ever appears as the separator.

Saved for web as “My-nice-name#12345.jpg” then run through Bridge renaming with the following RegEx setup:

Find: (.*)#(.*)

Replace: $2

4. Rename Sennheiser Profile Wireless WAV file to my preferred Date-Time format 

Example
REC_0015_20260321_094710.WAV
to
2026-03-21–094710–REC_0015.WAV

or if you prefer:
[8 characters of file-number]_[yyyy][mm][dd]_[hhmmss].ext
to yyyy-mm-dd–hhmmss–[8 characters of file-number].ext

Find: ^(.{8})_(d{4})(d{2})(d{2})_(d{6}).(w+)$

Replace: $2-$3-$4--$5--$1.$6

See also cheatography.com