renamer
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Freeware find: Smith Micro Photo A.K.A. bulk file renamer
While I'm saving my pennies for a new 27" i7 iMac, I'm finding that "free is good." Software development house Smith Micro made my day this morning when I received an email telling me about their free Photo A.K.A. application for Mac (site registration required). The app is a single-tasker -- it is a bulk file renamer, much like Dare to be Creative's Renamer (US$29). Like its more expensive competitor, you can rename any batch of files, not just photos. While I don't think that the user interface for Photo A.K.A. is as well-designed as Renamer, the former application does have several features that can't be found in the latter. For example, Photo A.K.A. can rename files, stuff them into an archive file, and then email the information to someone. There's also a handy built-in function to directly upload your renamed photos to Flickr or Picasa. But wait, there's more! Photo A.K.A. can also burn your renamed files to a CD or DVD, or create a disk image file containing the files. It can also do batch resizing of photo files, display the renamed images as a slide show, and even batch print the files. Finally, there's a sandbox mode for trying your renaming scheme without actually renaming the files. While Photo A.K.A. might not fulfill all of your file renaming requirements, it is free, and it has many features you may find useful.
Friday Favorite: R-Name
R-Name is a simple, single-purpose application that takes the names of files and folders on your Mac and renames them one at a time or in batches. I use it almost every day. Yes, there are a dozen ways to batch rename files. I like R-Name for a few reasons: It's fast, both in loading and renaming Easy to rename just files, folders or recurse folder Hard to mess things up because you have to preview the new names before committing Drag and drop (Apple forgets how important this feature is all too frequently) Here are the functions you can perform with R-Name: find and replace, number sequentially, add characters (beginning, before extension, at end), remove characters with the same options, change case, add/replace/remove extensions. There are some smart prefs too, but that's icing on the cake. Oh, and did I mention: it's donationware! The author asks you to make a donation to UNICEF. Unfortunately, R-Name appears to be abandonware -- the author's site is currently down (thus the source code is unavailable) and best I can tell the app is only supported to 10.3. But it works for me. What renaming tool or workflow do you use?
