How To Randomize Uploaded Filenames In Wordpress

And to make matters worse, if you’re using Skitch to capture screenshots of various terminal commands, it captures the full path from Terminal and uses that as the file name, which is just absurdly long.

The much simpler solution is to simply add a couple of lines of code to change all uploaded images to a simple randomized file name, and then trim it down to the first 8 characters to make sure that image paths in the HTML aren’t too crazy.

Paste the code into your functions.php file, located in your theme folder, and it should immediately start working.

This works by adding a function to the sanitize_file_name filter that does the work and returns the new file name. WordPress will attempt to use that new name – but if there’s a clash, it’ll add a -1 to the end and continue with numbering until it doesn’t have a clash anymore. Realistically that’s unlikely to happen, but it’s good to know that it won’t be an issue.