Batch Rename Your Files Easily – Mac Style (Mac Only)

“What’s in the name?”

That famous quote from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” tells us that the quality of an entity – such as a rose or a person – will not change even if the name is changed. But if Shakespeare were born in this modern era, he might rethink the statement carefully.

Name does matter. “Summer Holiday 2007 – 01.jpg” would make a better sense for us compared to “c0081503_8445631.jpg”. And I bet modern-age Romeo would cram his Mac hard drive with lots of files with non-sensible names. Unless he does something about it, he is going to spend most of his valuable time just trying to find the cutest picture of Juliet.

Change The Names With NameChanger

But fret not, Romeo, there are ways out of the naming problem. Use a free batch-renaming application called NameChanger from MRRSoftware. This app does only one thing, but does it good. Maybe it’s better than the paid apps.

The first thing you would see after launching the app is the simple interface. There are several icons that will help you access the commands quickly.

The first thing to do would be clicking the “Options” icon in the middle. There are checkboxes to Hide Extension, Ignore Case and Force Unique Names.

Then click “Add” to put files into the renaming list. You can also drag and drop files from Finder.

There’s also the list of choices of rules in the middle that will let you do advanced renaming to the files, including the usage of Wildcard, the ability to Remove Characters,

using Sequence,

and also adding Dates.

When you are done meddling with the choices and have the result you desired, click the “Rename” icon.

Image Browser & Other Useful Features

For image files, there’s an additional feature that you can use called the “Image Browser” that can be accessed from the toolbar. This browser will provide you with a quick peek of what images are being renamed.

You can also select/deselect individual files from the list by checking/unchecking the box in front of the file name.

Another useful feature that this little app could do is to save the “renaming session” by going to the Renames → Save Current Rename menu or by pressing the Command + S on the keyboard. This way you will be able to save the rules you’ve set in the sessions.

If you have several saved renaming sessions, you can access the session quickly from the Renames menu. You could also erase the saved sessions by going to the Renames → Manage Renames menu, select the one you want to delete and click the minus (-) button below.

I personally found this app to be very useful as I have literary thousands of image files with inhumane names given by the camera. What about you? Have you tried NameChanger or do you have other favorite renaming apps for your Mac? Share your opinions using the comments below.