Terminal Tips: Generate random filenames for digital photo frame images

I can't understand why you would go to all this effort to set this up. Lots of Digital Frames have random playback function. My one has about 1500 pictures on the Internal Memory and when i have it in shuffle mode, it's pretty effective. It even lets me shuffle the pictures in individual folders. Only cost me $89 on amazon.com.
These are the guys who do it: www.nix-digital.com
It's their 8 Inch frame that I have. Looks much better than an ipad too.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_photo?ie=UTF8&search-alias=photo&field-brandtextbin=NIX
Keep it simple dude!!

How about ln -s ; keep the original files, but still achieve the same effect.

Generate file name by timestamp with microseconds. If not enough concatenate some random value to the timestamp.

also with the "mv" command, you'll lose the original name of the file.

so grandma's slideshow will be "random", but you'll have no way of organizing the photos after the fact.

if you have the disk space available, swap out the "mv" command for "cp" and you'll create copies. then once you've put the randomly named files onto grandma's photo frame, just delete them.

if you didn't have disk space available, you could still "mv" the files, but retain the original filename after the $RANDOM. for example:

/Users/chuck/Desktop/PC Files/pictest> ls
scan0001.jpg scan0002.jpg scan0003.jpg
/Users/chuck/Desktop/PC Files/pictest> for picture in *.jpg; do mv $picture $RANDOM.$picture; done
/Users/chuck/Desktop/PC Files/pictest> ls
13517.scan0002.jpg 24733.scan0003.jpg 31922.scan0001.jpg

-chuck

technically the photos won't display randomly... they are just reordered randomly... so it will play the same way every time.

just sayin'... this would be pretty pointless if you didn't have lots of photos

Or, for even better randomness, you can use…

head /dev/random | md5

or, if you want the string to be shorter…

head /dev/random | md5 | cut -c 1-10

will only show the first 10 characters. You can also strip all of the letters if you only want numbers for whatever reason…

head /dev/random | md5 | 's/[a-z]//'

or only letters…

head /dev/random | md5 | 's/[0-9]//'

Note: The above is not recommended, as the letters can only be a-f.

You would of course have to use `` (where is something like head /dev/random | md5) instead of $RANDOM, so…

for i in *.jpg; do mv '$i' `head/dev/random | md5`.jpg; done

will rename any JPG images in the current directory to a random 32 characters, with .jpg of course.

Actually, to be on the safe side, a better command is:

for i in *.jpg; do mv "$i" $RANDOM.jpg; done

This will ensure that files with spaces or anything in the name will not screw it up.

Better still

for i in *.jpg *.JPG; do mv "$i" $RANDOM.jpg; done

will handle upper and lower case JPG extensions (and will work as expected even if they are all upper case or lower case).

WARNING: This will delete some files if $RANDOM ever ends up being the same, which it will.