Re-Organize and then Rename Digital Photos

I'm scanning a ton of photos of my family. I want to take the digital pictures and have them be shown based on the age of person at that time. The problem is, I'll rename one as 01.jpg and then another as 02.jpg, but then I'll find a new picture of where the person looks to be a certain age between 01 and 02 and I have to rename 02.jpg to 03.jpg and so on. As I scan more and more, this becomes a burden.

Do any of you know of a program where you can just drag and drop photos onto a timeline and then rename later on in bulk?

Scan them all without renaming them, sort visually in bridge or similar, then rename later.

Thanks for the reply. I do not have Photoshop CS. Do you know if this is possible in Lightroom or any other cheap software?

Lightroom will do it easily. Irfanview (free) might even do it.

I would simply keyword them with the age and then you can find them with whatever catalog software you want to use. Even Bridge would suffice though it is not a full fledged cataloging system. If you were to use the key wording method then you could go steps further and add which side of the family they came from or any other criteria you would like to add.

The keywording idea could be a go.

Other ideas:

1) You could come up with a naming convention that would allow for a broken-down dating that would be sortable alpha-numerically, such as xx.xxx so that say Sarah's first birthday photos could start with Sarah-01.000, figure out a layout that would ensure that each month would move up a step alpha-numerically (you could follow the 0-f convention so that "c" is month 12) and make that the first digit after the year. Now, if you have a shot that you figure goes before one you have but there is no open slot it is easy just to change the earlier number, name the new one, and they would be sorted in the proper order.

2) Another option would be to use something like ExifToolGUI to change either the Create Date or the Original Date (or both, to ensure that any sorting software can properly sort them). Of course, it's guesswork and you still might have to change things on the fly to make room for new entries, but it would work.

That is a problem I often have when building animations that consist of hundreds of gifs. When viewing it I might decide that I want a certain sequence to run slower. Lets say I want it to appear that gif number 100 stays on screen longer. I simply make several copies and number them 100a, 100b, etc.