Filename case transformation as option with choice: None, lowercase, CamelCase

I am a bit late on this @abitofmind, but I have a few thoughts.

Could space/punctuation replacement be made a bit more specific?

You mean, Media File Renamer doesn’t do ” ” → “-“ and ” – ” → “–“ already? Logically, it should. I just want to make sure of that with you.

Ad 2) “to lowercase”. Please make this a preference:

So actually, I wanted to make the plugin safer to use, and cause less troubles/issues. Originally, it was case free, but this causes a huge amount of issues. If you are using a IIS server, actually, case has an impact in the filesystem. If you are using Apache, it doesn’t. Same issues go with DBs. Moving from one hosting to another would also create a mess, where files seem unlinked with the DBs and a lot of other weird side-effects.

In conclusion, filenames should be always written using ascii letters, and in lowercase. It’s a like a rule ?? Regarding to SEO, I think it’s not only cleaner, but the search engines will not make any differences based on the case. Based on the experience of helping my users, the move to lock the case to lowercase was a good one, and stopped most of the issues encountered in the past.

Of course, I could give a secret option to enable it, but I really, really, do not recommend it ??

More specific punctuation replacement rulesets:

My form input was indeed mangled. I asked whether differentiated replacement policies like the following would be possible, e.g.:

• space → minus
• space longDash space → two minus characters instead of just one minus character

Transforming case:

• I agree 100% that the software should ship with safe defaults which make it safe and convenient for users to work long time and also survive migrations between different systems without issues. A good UX that you apply a transformation to lowercase by default.
• But for advanced users who know what they need, and who made a balanced pro/con assessment on their own, and deem the risks worth the benefits, it would be good to have an option (with a clear statement of the pros of the default and that changing it is at your own risk).
• I decided that I wanna go with [A-Za-z0-9] without the extended Latin alphabet and the minus character as the only punctuation/separating character. That character set is safe on any filesystem. The uppercase I would like to allow because when people download the files or share links the readability so much stronger than with all lowercase: You can far better recognise abbreviations or compound words which are written in CamelCase when you allow mixed case.
• That was the reason why I decided to work without Media File Renamer. I decided I must get the name correct prior uploading to WordPress. Having the possibility to rename the media title and the automatic file name renaming preserves the case, would make the plugin more attractive for me.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by abitofmind.

The hardcoded “Transform to lowercase” was the reason for me to finally not use your plugin, despite liking all the other functionality.

Will you offer an option “Leave case unchanged”?

Will you offer an option?“Leave case unchanged”?

If it’s really a problem, I could propose the option ?? However, in my experience with my users, not making the filenames lowercase can be a huge issue, especially when moving files to a new hosting service (but it could be as the encoding between the filesystem and the sql server might also interpret things differently). On the other hand, having everything in lowercase has, in my opinion, no negative consequences ??

Why would you like to have the case unchanged? What’s the benefits?

As an option only for pro users with good reasons (like me):

I decided that I wanna go with [A-Za-z0-9] without the extended Latin alphabet and the minus character as the only punctuation/separating character.

That character set is safe on any filesystem.

Uppercase I would like to allow because when people download the files or share links the readability is so much stronger than with all lowercase: You can far better recognize abbreviations or compound words written in CamelCase when you allow mixed case.

To be error safe I have this setup: My Media Library is on a separate media subdomain. On this subdomain I serve files case-insensitive by using a .htaccess with a directive to activate Apache‘s mod_speling with CheckSpelling on and CheckCaseOnly on and CheckBasenameMatch off to be strict.

So regardless whether the user requests /pic.jpg or /pic.JPG or /PIC.jpg or similar, they all get served the real /Pic.jpg (not only served the request as-is with a HTTP 200 Found but with a HTTP 301 Moved Permanently to /Pic.jpg so that this file URL is recognized as the canonical URL and that users share/bookmark that canonical URL.

After I illustrated my use case: Will you implement a “Leave case unchanged” option?

I would buy Pro guaranteed if I got this option.

I know I’d only be +1 customer. But the implementation effort can’t be too hard:

• One extra user option.
• One function which applies renaming not hardcoded but conditional from that user option.

Sounds not too much extra effort for some extra revenue.

Appreciating a reply! Thanks!

@tigroumeow finally explicitly declined to support Mixed Case filenames with detailed reasons and noted that nevertheless I could Customize the filenames with the plugin’s provided filter hooks.