Our church just purchased two 10-inch LCD Photo Frames. We’re going to be putting them up in our lobby to display announcements and photos from church-life. It’s going to be splendid – I can’t wait to get them up.

I’ve been working with them a bit today and trying to “randomize” the photos & graphics has been quite cumbersome. I’m sure some higher-end models allow for a “random” slideshow, but ours simply goes in sequence according to the file name. That just ticked me off.

So, I did a little “browsing” and found a great solution. I offer it here because others may want to do the same and may find this solution very helpful!

I simply downloaded a program called, “File Renamer Basic“. It’s free, simple to use, and perfect for this application. I simply put all of the image files into a directory and pointed File Renamer Basic to that directory and after a few trial-and-error attempts managed to get each file renamed to a random number filename (our frames require a .jpg extension – this was simple to keep as the standard using this application).

It couldn’t be easier (well, if my photo frame had a “randomizer” built in, I guess that would be easier).

I now have 70+ images stored on our one photo frame and am currently watching the “random” slideshow while sitting here at the desk! I know that it may be a bit discouraging that my “random” slideshow will repeat itself exactly as it played the first time, but this is something I believer we can live with.

For what it’s worth, we bought two of these photo frames for our purposes here.