Mayayana posted:

I'm not sure what you mean. Naming them
image1, image2, etc is random in the sense that
the names bear no relation to the originals. But
then they'll show in Explorer based on your settings.
(Usually alphabetical, top down.)

How they get returned programmatically is a
third issue. I'm not sure how that works. It may
be based on date or it may just be based on how
the system has stored the file data. In other words,
if you use a system API to enumerate files in a folder,
it won't necessarily find them in any notable order.

You never explained what you want, so I don't
know what kind of "randomness" you're looking for.
If you want to do something like show numerous
images in random order then you don't really need
to change file names. Just enumerate the files
and then shuffle the names.

Let's give up because I have what I want as long as I do not use IV.

I am feeding copies of photos and images to a program that shows them on
the screen in the order that the operating system gives them to that
program.

It's not more complicated than that.

I just want the files to not clump in similar types and dates.

By nature of how the images were obtained, they "clump" up, where, as I
explained, the "cows" tend to be clumped together, and the "cats" are
clumped together, where this is only a tendency, not an iron clad rule.

I don't know exactly what clumps the files together but it could partly be
the name, partly be the modification date, partly the original date, and
partly the file types or sizes. I don't know since there are thousands of
them.

All I want is to even out that obvious clumping, which the randomizer.zip
script does by renaming the files numerically, which means those files are
fed numerically by the operating system into the program that displays
them.

The only strange thing was when I used Irfanview to rename for a second
time the previous randomized files to simpler names, instead of being
numerical, to alphanumeric of the format "image001" "image002" "image003"
and so on.

For whatever reason, IV is clumping the subjects back up again.

I suspect Irvanview is using as its input order something OTHER than the
numeric file name which is causing that clumping to return even after the
file names were randomized numerically.

As long as I keep Irfanview out of the name changing sequence,
the clumping is destroyed.

I don't really need to talk about it more where I found a good solution
which works as long as I don't use Irfanview in that solution.