Rename Images with AI

ImageRenamingAI is a desktop application built with Python, tkinter, and ttkbootstrap that solves a universal problem: folders full of cryptically named images. The app connects to Ollama's local vision models to "see" what's in each image and generate meaningful filenames automatically.

The architecture follows a clean modular structure with separated concerns for UI, AI service, and file handling. It supports batch renaming of entire directories or selective single-image processing, with real-time preview, progress tracking, and smart collision handling for duplicate names. All processing happens locally, so images never leave your machine.

Tech stack: Python 3.8+, tkinter, ttkbootstrap (Cyborg theme), Ollama, Pillow, and threading for responsive UI.

Every photographer, designer, and casual phone user ends up with folders of images named IMG_0001.jpg, DSC_1234.jpg, or Screenshot_20231015.png. Finding a specific photo becomes a guessing game.

The initial approach hit a wall immediately. Not all AI models can process images. The first attempt used Mistral, a text-only language model, which returned filenames like "im_sorry_but_i_cant_process_images.jpg" instead of actual descriptions. Beyond model selection, the project needed to solve for GUI responsiveness during heavy AI processing, filesystem-safe name generation from unpredictable AI output, filename collisions when multiple images get similar descriptions, and graceful handling of empty or useless model responses.

The breakthrough was switching to LLaVA, a multimodal vision model that can actually analyze image content. The app auto-detects installed vision models by filtering against a whitelist, and warns users if they select a text-only model by scanning responses for error indicators like "sorry" or "cannot."

Threading keeps the UI fully responsive while the AI processes images in the background, with thread-safe updates via tkinter's root.after() method. A sanitization pipeline handles AI output by forcing lowercase, replacing spaces with underscores, stripping invalid characters, and truncating to 30 characters. Duplicate filenames get automatic numeric suffixes. The result: IMG_0001.jpg becomes sunset_beach.jpg, and an entire photo library can be organized in minutes without touching a cloud API.