File names changed by Win 8.1

Or even better do what OS/2 and Mac OS Classic used to do: Embed a bit of metadata into the file that tells what it is and then programs can be set to open specific types of files based on this metadata hash. Extensions were originally just a convention for being able to quickly tell the difference between files from a command line. In the GUI world, they serve no real purpose.

If a slide show app is being tripped up by EXIF data (some call it metadata) then the choices are to remove such or change slide show apps.

I still wonder at times if the day of the PC is over as I have more encounters with folk that get upset about how associations work.
Bob

is reported to pull this stunt on people's files stored there. It's a one up numbering system for duplicate files.

My thought here is that folk are upset about file associations and how duplicates are handled. That is, a few folk are asking for this stuff to work without any effort on their part.
Bob

But I have to say one thing in defense of some of us ....

There have been plenty of times that I did the research but I still didn't understand and came to you guy's and asked for help. Some of us are truly Thick Headed.
This thread actually turned into a pretty complicated conversation for a typical user to understand.
Digger

The Nero one sounds like a file association issue. My thought on that is that folk are moving away from learning what that is. In short, folk don't want to change such and maybe it's time for a change.
(No, I'm fine with what we have.)
Bob

I'd say there are a lot of people who are moving away from learning period. How many times have you tried explaining something to people, like maybe why they should be migrating away from XP for example, and you get a response that boils down to they don't want to have to learn something new? I'm guessing you lost count years ago.

You could go even further out and see the whole anti-intellectual progression in this country. Time was people like Albert Einstein were celebrities, celebrated for their intellect. Now you have people who basically claim that all of science is just a long-con somehow aimed at depriving people of jobs and/or freedom (which they generally have confused with liberty). We managed to go from basically a rocket program that could barely manage to get a simple rocket off the ground to putting men on the moon within a couple decades, but what have we done since then besides slowly decline? The computer, Internet, cell phone... All of that was invented in the 40s-70s. Color TV goes as far back as the 20s and if not for WWI, might have taken root much more quickly. Cell phones were used in WWII... All we've done is make things smaller. Whoopie!

It was invented in the 20s, as Bob's link points out, it just didn't see any kind of widespread distribution until the 50s and 60s. Most people don't realize that cell phones existed, and were used, in WWII either. They think they just sort of came out of thin air around the 1980s.

We haven't really invented anything revolutionary in probably at least 2-3 generations now. Plus you have the religious nutters on the one side and entrenched coal and oil interests on the other all chipping away at the rather meager science education future generations get in their primary education. It's no wonder really.

I used Kubuntu LIVE DVD, version 12.10
I booted to the DVD
I then opened Konsole
I entered the following command

sudo apt-get install rename

After it downloaded and installed, I then entered this command

rename

This opened the graphical rename program that runs in KDE (Kool Desktop Edition) that's in Kubuntu.

In this program you will see a "Find and Replace" for file names. There are other methods there to remove last # of letters in filenames and so forth.

I copied some files from my windows Media folder into a Kubuntu folder.

I then adjusted them as seen in these screen captures.

http://glenburniemd.net/CNET/Krename.png

http://glenburniemd.net/CNET/Krename1.png

Practice doing it first before running it on your files on the drive they are located. Like I did, copy some into a Kubuntu folder under HOME (Pictures or Documents or Music, etc) and then once you've mastered how to accomplish it, you can do the changes on your files on your own drive.

Remember, a LIVE version of Kubuntu won't save anything except to your own drive since it's just a virtual OS running in a Ramdrive (virtual drive) and everything you do with it, if you leave it in Kubuntu folders, will disappear once it's turned off. Persistence is only if you install the Kubuntu. If however you make sure to write the changes or do the changes on your harddrive, that will remain. Also, if you want to do this twice, you have to reinstall the Krename each time since that also disappears each time you turn off the Kubuntu, because it's all virtually contained in dynamic RAM.

where I put rename it should have been Krename.