How to best automate batch naming of product images

[WebLincon]

On an ecommerce website with tens of thousands of products, product image file names are auto generated by your system, and are often just a string of numbers and letters. We optimize our callout images and heroes but I'm questioning if we are missing a big opportunity with our product image names not being optimized. Does anyone have any insight on a smarter way to automate batch naming for thousands of product images?

[customerparadigm.com]

Brandon-

I'm a big fan of optimizing images to use descriptive names; it seems to have worked quite a bit in the past. Search engines often will look for contextual clues about the content of an image, and this includes ALT tags, photo captions, and the image name.

In a Moz blog posting by Kasy Allen in 2011:
http://moz.com/blog/is-optimizing-photos-more-important-than-you-think

"The Google image bot definitely seems to be looking at filename and the alt tag, but it also looks at a lot of the same factors that the Google search bot looks at - title tag, meta description, heading tags, links and anchor text. If we are already focused on optimizing our individual pages, maybe it's time to remember that image optimization is just as important. Oh, and it also seems to be important that you host your own images, but you already knew that, right?"

I've found that it's best to name each image during the product creation process. It's nice to have the product name and SKU in the image, and I also like to use directories, too.

So if a product named Canon 50 mm f/1.4 lens in category Canon Camera Lenses, you might want to name it here with this directory structure:

http://www.domain.com/images/canon/DSLR/lens/canon-50mm-f-1.4-lens.jpg

But if you need to do this in a bulk fashion, you can create the category and directory structure using a spreadsheet and the concatenate feature. You can also do a find-replace on spaces in a product name to insert dashes, etc.

See the screenshot here: http://www.customerparadigm.com/images/moz-screenshots/concatenation-bulk-renaming.gif

You could also use LightRoom or Photoshop to help automate photo names as well.

I hope this helps!
-- Jeff