How to batch rename files in OS X
April 27, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania
NameChanger is a very useful application from MRR Software that helps you rename a list of files quickly and easily. The main purpose of this application is to help rename photographs, although it works well for other kinds of files as well. When you have a large number of photographs it is quite useful to have a software like this one that can perform a batch renaming of the image files quickly and effectively.
NameChanger is really simple to use. All you need to do is drag the files you want into the application window, tell NameChanger what kind of naming scheme you want for the files, and then fire NameChanger away. It will quickly rename all the files at hand. You can always roll back the changes if you are unhappy. The application offers a number of ways to modify the names of files. You can append or prepend things like the date, or a sequence, or even remove a character from all the files.
The way it works is you drag and drop a bunch of files into NameChanger. Then you instruct the application on how you want the files to be renamed. Say you dump a few photographs from a trip to New Zealand. By default you camera software would name them with some crazy naming conventions such as DCP_12398. However, for the ease of managing these photographs you might want all the files to be named something like this, NewZealand001, NewZealand002, NewZealand003, and so on. This is where NameChanger comes in handy. You can do the above with great ease using NameChanger.
If you are still unsure as to how to use NameChanger, here’s a great video demonstrating the usage of NameChanger. NameChanger is a free application and the developers request you to donate some money to their project using a Paypal account, if you find it helpful.
I use NameMangler: http://www.manytricks.com/namemangler/
It’s got a powerful regex replacement mode, for more advanced uses.