I'm surprised that I never remembered to share this tool with the target market.

If you save pictures from dA, you've seen that their file names are backwards: "language_logos_by_nzen-d4agwvx.png" Leaving it like that would spread an artist's files all over a folder by image name, which is inconvenient. So, I created a program to cut the characters between _by_ and either a period or hyphen (ie the artist name) and pastes it at the front. The image name's underscores are then turned into single spaces. So the example above becomes "nzen language logos.png"

You can download the exe here:
win7 . . [link]
winxp . [link]

Keep aware

This is written in C++ for windows & .net. If you don't have .net, you can download it from microsoft's site, free ( [link] ). If you get .net & neither of those exe's work (vista?), consider downloading visual studio's c++ express & compiling the source code ([link] )
[Which is like saying, "if you don't have eggs to bake a cake, why not raise a chicken?"]

As I said, it rotates the file name around the _by_, so if you save a file with the word by in the image name (me_by_the_bay_by_daVinci), make sure to change one of those underscores to a space or your artist's name will be 'the_bay_by_daVinci. I didn't dare change the underscores in the artist name since they could be underscores, hypens or apostrophes.

Oh, this program checks all the files in a folder, but not subfolders. If you should happen to have some .mpeg file in there with _by_ in the name, it will garble that. If it misses a file, which happens occasionally, just run it again.

If you are some putz who thinks that faving pics is better than saving, wake up. Geocities is gone and people delete their accounts all the time. (Believe it or not, that was the brushoff that I got when I asked about the filenames originally, [link] ).

To anyone with programming experience, yes, this is the worst kind of FSM in place of a regex. It was what I knew how to use at the time. I'm learning python now, so I'll see if it is amenable to an os agnostic name manipulation.