Renamer4Mac: Automated File Renaming

One of the most grudging management tasks is renaming files, especially when you have many and they all need to be similarly renamed. For example: you want to rename a dozen photos from “DSC003123.jpg” to something more meaningful like “Wedding-Pictures-23.jpg.” Dare to be Creative has released version 3 of it’s batch renaming utility, the aptly named Renamer4Mac, a solution to this mind numbing task.

Renamer4Mac allows you to rename files with 5 variables. Search & Replace and Convert Case do exactly what they suggest. Insert and Remove allows you to respectively add or remove characters at any point in a filename. Finally, Renamer4Mac can number files in different ways, as in with numbers or letters or a combination of the two.

The application can also save presents of your actions, so you can recall them if you ever need to replicate them again. Although you can manually import files into the application through a dialog box or via drag-and-drop, Renamer4Mac also includes an optional Finder contextual menu plugin which streamlines the process.

The biggest new feature in version 3 is the price. Renamer4Mac was previously a donation-ware utility from developer Werner Freytag. the application has since been acquired by Dare to be Creative and bumped up to version 3. Renamer4Mac has gained a price tag… and not much else.

For example, the newly revamped interface: The new design is less cluttered and as a result may be more intuitive for new users, but is also less efficient in its use of screen space. The other minor new feature is the application updater, which automatically finds and installs updates from within the application.

As a user of the previous version, which was free, there’s little incentive for me to upgrade to the new paid version. The new interface is nice, but compared to the old one it takes up more space and offers little else besides aesthetics.

Renamer4Mac is also a tad expensive, not only because the previous version was free, but compared to it’s competitors. For example, Name Those Files! from developer Jonathan Nathan offers pretty much the the same thing and costs only $18.75 USD.

And then there are the free solutions. For example, Name Mangler from ManyTricks is free and offers an equivalent experience with more powerful features. Alternatively, if you know how to use Automator or the Terminal, you can accomplish everything Renamer4Mac offers within Mac OS X without any third party software whatsoever.

If you want to check it out, though, Renamer4Mac 3 is $26 USD and can be found at Dare to be Creative.

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