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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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I know the following is trivial to most of you. However, what I see occasionally in forum articles suggests that there are quite a few Skyrim players who have the impression that giving your savegames names of your choosing is somehow complicated. Astonishingly, there are people who use a mod for renaming their savegames. Even more astonishingly, someone (obviously) wrote that mod.
Everyone who plays Skyrim on a PC can easily rename his Skyrim savegames to anything, as long as it's a legitimate filename, that is without weird symbols. It doesn't require any special skills, let alone a mod.
That is because Skyrim savegames are stored on your computer's hard disk as files, and you can rename them just like any other files. The game will be able to read them and interpret them as legitimate Skyrim savegames no matter what they're called.
It's a perfectly safe procedure that can impossibly damage your savegames or cause a malfunction in your game. I have done it thousands of times without the slightest problem.
Open your file manager. (If you don't know what that means, double-click on the icon "My Computer" or "This PC".)
Find the directory ("folder" in Windows Newspeak) where your savegames are stored. The path should look similar to this:
C:\Users\User\My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves
If you can't find it, do a file search for
*.ess
In that directory, you will see a number of files whose names look something like this:
Save 97 - John Dragonsreach 07.43.21.ess
Save 97 - John Dragonsreach 07.43.21.skse
Save 98 - John Whiterun 07.45.49.ess
Save 98 - John Whiterun 07.45.49.skse
etc.
Note that each savegame consists of two files whose names are identical, except that one has the extension ess and the other one has the extension skse.
Suppose you want to rename the savegame
Save 97 - John Dragonsreach 07.43.21
into
became thane of Whiterun
To do that, simply rename the file
Save 97 - John Dragonsreach 07.43.21.ess
into
became thane of Whiterun.ess
and the file
Save 97 - John Dragonsreach 07.43.21.skse
into
became thane of Whiterun.skse
That's it. When you execute Skyrim, you will see that the savegame is listed under its new name and it works exactly as before.
There is only one thing you have to keep in mind: the .ess file and the .skse file need to have exactly identical names (sans extension). Even an extra space somewhere can prevent the program from recognizing the savegame properly. That is why I always copy-and-paste the name of the first file into the name of the other (sans extension) rather than typing it anew.
You can't give one and the same name to two different savegames. If you try to do that, Windows will ask you if you want to overwrite the other file. Click "no" or press Escape and make up a slightly different name.
Of course, you can also remove any savegames you don't want to keep. Just delete the two files
savegame-you-want-to-delete.ess
and
savegame-you-want-to-delete.skse
