Bulk rename files to web-safe names
The Clean up rule in FTP by Zaweba's bulk rename strips accents, collapses spaces and keeps only web-safe characters across many server files.
Web-safe names, with no spaces, accents or odd symbols, are what the Clean up rule in FTP by Zaweba's bulk rename produces. Pick the files in Disk, add Clean up, and it makes spaces single, removes doubled hyphens and underscores, trims the ends, removes accents and keeps letters, digits, full stops, hyphens and underscores only. You check the preview, then press Rename.
File names with spaces and special characters work on your PC but cause trouble on the web. A space in a link becomes %20, some servers and tools treat capital letters as different files, and an accented letter can be stored one way and linked another so that the picture simply doesn't appear. Photos named by phones and documents named by clients are the usual sources.
Why it matters on a website
Web servers on ordinary hosting usually run Linux, where Photo.JPG and photo.jpg are two different files. Links written by hand rarely match odd names exactly, and email programs and social sites sometimes break links at spaces. Clean names avoid all of this. They are easier to type, they read well in an address bar, and they don't need encoding.
Cleaning up names step by step
Open Disk from the toolbar or the Site menu and let it scan. Tag the files to clean: a whole folder of uploads, say, or everything matched by Tag by with a filespec such as *.jpg.
Open bulk rename and add the Clean up rule. Between them, its tidy ups deal with the spaces, the doubled separators, the stray characters at the ends and the accents. Look at the preview, which shows each current name beside its new one.
If you want lower case names too, add a Case rule. Rules run top to bottom, each acting on the result of the one above, and the preview always shows the final name. A Replace rule can turn spaces into hyphens first if you prefer hyphens to whatever Clean up would leave.
When the preview reads well, press Rename.
Spotting clashes in the preview
Cleaning names can make two different files end up with the same name. Café menu.pdf and Cafe menu.pdf both want to become the same thing once accents and spaces are dealt with. Read the preview for duplicates before you run it, and rename one of the pair by hand or add a New name or number rule to tell them apart.
Protected items are left out of bulk rename automatically, so .htaccess, configuration files and cPanel folders keep their names whatever rules you add.
Keeping links working
Changing names breaks links to the old ones. After a rename, FTP by Zaweba's link awareness lists references to the old paths in your linked local site (.php, .html, .css, .js and .htaccess files) and can rewrite them, keeping relative links relative and full addresses full. Only local files are edited, and it can be undone. Upload the updated pages afterwards.
If something still goes wrong, the operations log records the rename as a batch, and Undo this batch restores the original names.
Clean names from the start
Bulk rename is the cure; good habits are the prevention. When you save pictures for the site with Save for Web, give the copy a clean name there and then. Agree a naming style with anyone else who uploads, and run Clean up over the uploads folder now and then to catch the strays.
Other ways to clean names
You can rename files on your PC before uploading, and Windows tools exist for batch renaming local files. That helps for new uploads but does nothing for files already on the server, which is where the broken links are. FTP by Zaweba renames them in place, over the connection you already have, and shows every result before it happens.
