How to rename files on your Mac with Renamer4Mac

Here’s the deal. Renaming files on a Mac is something of a pain in the rear. In Leopard you can select a single file, hit the Return key, which highlights the file’s name, then type in a new name. If you have 150 files to rename—photos, documents, music—repeat that pain 150 times. Or, use Renamer4Mac. It renames without the pain.

In a nutshell, Renamer4Mac:

Renamer4Mac allows you to easily and quickly rename a large number of files.

No Instructions

What do you think of an attractive Mac utility that comes with no instruction manual?

It’s either very good, simple to use, elegant, and intuitive. Or, it doesn’t work very well anyway, so an instruction manual won’t help much.

All I could find for Renamer4Mac home page was a screenshot.

Handy, yes. But I made a few of my own.

Renaming a lot of files is tedious, time consuming, fraught with error possibilities. No, make that probabilities. As the number of files increases, so do the number of errors when you seek to rename.

Instead of renaming by hand, rename via point and click. It’s much easier.

Renamer4Mac supports search and replace renaming, numbering files, and converting between lower, upper and mixed case. Renamer4Mac handles regular expression and case sensitive matching.

In the example above, I grabbed a folder with over 100 photos, all .jpg images, all with arcane names. In this case, what I wanted to do was add the word “photo” to the beginning of the file name—for all photos, all files.

I typed in the word photo_ with the underscore, checked the Preview for new name to make sure I fully understood what would happen when I clicked the Rename button. Then I clicked the Rename button.

In one second, all the files were renamed.

There’s More?

Renamer4Mac renames, yes, but does more than just stick a few characters or words to the front of the file name. It can delete characters from the file name, change the extension, even overwrite portions of text with something new.

It’s just as easy to add numbers to file names, even format the old name with a label that has a number, and start the number at whatever number you want.

The Convert Case button changes the case of the new file name—capitalize, uppercase, lowercase, and Name only, Name and Extension, or Extension only.

Finder Renamer

Renamer4Mac is a standalone utility that you open to rename files on your Mac. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just use a renaming utility built-in to the Finder?

Inside the Preferences is an option to install a contextual menu for Renamer4Mac. That means you can select files in the Finder, right click, and use the built-in menu to have Renamer4Mac change file names.

The is the Mac way to rename files. Another way is to rename files without spending the $26 for Renamer4Mac. There are about a dozen similar utilities for OS X, though only a few have been upgraded for Leopard.

FileMangler doesn’t have quite as many features, but is free. BatchRename’Em is also free, as is the ever popular FileWrangler.