Have you ever wondered how to add various images of people to your websites without having to worry about copyright infringement? Paul has a few tips and tricks for generating images of people who aren't actually real for you to use on any of your creatives! In this video, Paul also covers how to use these images, and some neat tricks on Windows to make file renaming - for the images or any other batch of files - an absolute breeze!
Transcription:
Hi. So it's Paul here and I wanna show you some really useful hints and tips and tricks. All rolled into one single video here. There's gonna be quite a lot going on. So bear with me. I think you'll find some of the things that you see here quite useful. So you might often find the need to have faces in adverse and things like that, that you are composing for Facebook ads, and you have to always consider breach of copyright personal infringement, those kinds of issues.
But if you come to this website generated photos, you'll find a whole bunch of computer generated images that you can use. So these aren't real people, they certainly look very real. But they're not. So you can use these without any danger of infringing, copyright, or getting any prosecution against personal or infringement claims or anything of that nature.
So you can play around with the settings here. I'm gonna leave them just as. And I'm gonna download these images. I've got a fantastic Chrome extension here, which is this little pink arrow that I'm pointing my cursor to at the top here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click that select all, and then I'm gonna download 33 images.
So that'll take a little while to complete. Now it's opened a couple other browsers tabs here. Cause they're part of those images on that webpage it's discovered are gifts and I don't really want those. So we're just gonna close those browsers that it's opened. So if we're going to the folder, I think it's just about finished in the download now.
There we go. Let's just get rid of those three. Don't want those. So yes. Put those in the recycle bin, please. So these are 30 images that it's downloaded, but as you can see the file names, aren't particularly user friendly. I'm gonna, I want to actually name those files with a person's. What we're gonna do if is a little trick from the old Ms.
Dos days from many years ago. So you open the start button on your computer, windows 10, by the way. And if you type command, you'll get the command prompt come up. So that's the command prompt. So I'm gonna highlight my folder name here. Control. Coming to my command prompt type CD, which means change directory hit return.
Then I'm gonna do DIR, which is listing the contents of that directory or folder, whatever you wish to call it. And there, you can see all those files are there also. So that's a bit like for go back into file Explorer and I do view details. So you can see there, there's all the file names. And there they are again, what they look like at the Ms.
Dos prompt. So let's look at the bottom one there. So we've got V3. Oh, 9, 3 0, 87 and Dell over here. Look V3. Oh, 9 3 0 3 87. So what I'm gonna do now is a bit of jiggery poker. I want to get all of those file names into a file. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna type D. Use the arrow symbol there, which is a redirect.
So instead of listing the files to the screen, it's gonna put them into the redirect. so.dot means the folder above the parent folder, and I'm gonna create a file called. Photo file names dot T XT. Oops. I can't spell mistype that for some reason there, so hit return. And then you'll see if I refresh the window here.
It can go up. Sorry, not refresh. Go up. You'll see. I go date modified, go to the top photo far names dot text. Let's just have a quick look there. So I've got all this file names into a text file, but they're not quite how I want them. So now this is the clever stuff. We're gonna open that with Microsoft word,
and we're gonna do some tidying up. Let's just get rid of that there. So I'm gonna come down to here. Hit delete. Cause I don't want those. Let's go down to the bottom again. There's a couple of stuff. A couple of things there. I don't want so hit, delete, get rid of that. So we're nearly there. We've got the file names here, but we've got all this other date time and file size information that we don't want.
Don't want. Now there's a really neat trick that you can do in Microsoft word. If you hold the alt button down on the keyboard
and then highlight the text, you can do this. Which is really clever. Really cool. So I've highlighted that stuff that I don't want missed. Didn't quite get it right there. Let's try again. Come down. Whoops. I'm gonna go right across there. So I've highlighted that and I've hit delete while I just have the fire names.
So now I'm gonna copy those control a control C into a spreadsheet.
Control V. The next thing I'm gonna do is I want to look this, that didn't quite go where I wanted it to go. Let's try again. Control V. There we go. Now, the next thing I want to do is get some names of people. So I'm gonna go to this other very useful. So this one is called phosphite.com and it's got a tool for generating people's names.
So I've put in a 30 people, male, female. Now, strictly speaking, if I'd have thought about this properly, I would've downloaded men's photos so I can match up with men's names and women's photos. So I can match up with women's names. Cause obviously my photos are a mix and my names here are a mix.
I should have a bit more forward thinking, but I'm sure that you can see that you could do that. You could just download some men's photos, have men's names and then just download some ladies' photos and have ladies' names. But anyway, don't worry about that. So what I'm gonna do is export all these names to a CSV farm come separate the variable farm, which is another Excel file.
I'm opening it. So I've got those names there. So if I could do control C. Now I'm gonna put 'em in this column here and you'll start to see what's gonna happen. Let's do that now. I want to get, it's always good to avoid having spaces in phone names. So I'm gonna take the space character, and I'm gonna replace it with a hyphen there.
Replace all close that. Now in column C, I've used an Excel conatation formula. Conatation joins the contents of various texts and cell contents together. So I've used the word rename there. Now, rename, as you'll see in a minute is a dos, an Ms. Dos command prompt name, and I've used the ampersand to join that together.
With the contents of cell, a and cell B to create a command. And the command says, rename file V 3 0 1 4 8 2 6, JPEG two David and trade JPG. So it's done that there for you. So now I've just created it in the first cell. And as, as you can, with X Excel, you just drag down and it populates all the cells so very quickly and easy there, you can see that I've set up the rename command.
For all of those 33, how many files? 30 files. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna control, copy those control C put 'em on a clipboard, go back to my command prompt here. So I'm just gonna do di once again, so you can see there, the original phone. Now I'm gonna do control V. And what it's done is it's renamed all this files.
If I do DIR again there, look at that. So let's go to a file Explorer.
Go back to the four I was in before generated and you can see all of those files have been renamed. To the person's name. So that technique that I'll show you in Excel is brilliant. If you've got a whole bunch of files that are named completely randomly, you can set the files, file names up inside of Excel.
And of course you can use the power of Excel to create formulas auto population sequences, numbers, filter. All kinds of things. So it's very easy for you to create a new file name format inside Excel, set it up with the rename command and VO voila. It's so easy to then rename a whole bunch of files in bulk.
So if you had a hundred files there or 300 files, you can see the same theory applied, very easy to do really little neat trick. So that's it. So I showed you how to get faces from a computer generated or rather an artificial intelligence generated website. So that you can use them without fear of copyright infringement or such and I'll showed you how to get those files and rename them to something more meaningful than just the names that they already had.
And this is particularly good. know, If you've downloaded lots of images from a camera and they're like image one image to image three da, you can go into your spreadsheet in Excel. And you can either download the names as I show you. Or if it's doing something completely different, nothing to do with photographs, nothing to do with people's names, you can still use all these different formulas and other features inside Excel to create file names that are meaningful, and that are of the structure that you want to have, like a naming convention or whatever it is that you want to do.
And you can use the ation feature to Very easily create the new file names. And it could be for example, that you has, instead of people's names there, you might have something like I dunno image 0, 0, 0 1 or something like that. So you can think of a new naming convention for your files. That's gonna be useful for you and that's gonna work for you.
And it could be that, for example, all your file names need to be the same number of characters, whatever it is that you wanna do, that shows you how to do it. So that's. I hope you found that really useful quite a few different things being shown there all, all at the same time. So how long have we been running for?
I think we've been running for about 10 minutes or so. So in a short space of time, we've covered a lot of ground and I think you've seen some useful tricks. Hope. That was good. Thanks for watching. Bye.