At this time I believe the best format for renaming is: Year, Month, Day, Hours, Minutes, Seconds, however I may expand on this to put location in too. This format will allow you to view a folder in name order and see all images in the correct chronological order.
The problem if finding an application to rename all your images based on EXIF information, I did some general Google searches for such applications - but it turned up shareware and the like - in this day and age I find that hard to believe.
In the end I came across a post referencing my favorite image viewer for accomplishing this task. IrfanView, https://irfanview-forum.de/showthread.php?t=1435.
I have been using IranfView for longer than I can recall, but never knew about the powers of it's batch renaming.
Renaming options are found under File, Batch Rename/Conversion...
To achieve my renaming format I used the following pattern:
$E36867(%Y_%m_%d %H%M%S)
However, some image editors I have used over the years, I guess, strip the EXIF information, which ends up creating a null filename, followed by the next file not being renamed at all (based on settings).
At this point I chose to name the image based on the creation date, using the following pattern:
$T(%Y_%m_%d %H%M%S)
All in all I am fairly happy with the renaming, but like I suggest - location might be a good idea too.
Additional naming pattern information can be found in the help file.
Update: You can also try out the following application, Namexif:
http://www.digicamsoft.com/softnamexif.html
