Batch renamer
What Batch renamer actually does
A batch rename is one keystroke away from a mess, and the mess is usually not the rule. It is the one file the rule was not written for: the one already named correctly, the one whose new name collides with a file you were not touching, the one where the pattern produces a name you would never have typed. Most renamers show you a preview and give you nothing to do about it except go back and change the rule for everyone. This page treats the plan as the product. Every file that matches is a row, the new name sits in a text box you can type into, and a Keep box drops one file without disturbing the others. Change the rule afterwards and the rows you edited stay as you left them while the rest recompute. Collisions are found before anything is produced, including the case-insensitive kind that only fails on a Mac or a Windows machine, and the message lands on both rows rather than in a banner. The download stays locked while a problem is on screen. Templates take the tokens the command line tool takes: the original name, the extension, the folder, a sequence number with a width, and the modification date in any format strftime writes, with an unsupported one refused rather than left in the filename. Choose a folder rather than files and the folder token has something to expand to, and the match glob has a set worth filtering.
How to use it
- Choose files, or choose a whole folder. Only the names and dates are read; the contents are never opened and nothing is uploaded.
- Write a template such as shoot-{seq:3}{ext}, or use find and replace with an optional regular expression.
- Narrow the set with a glob if you need to. It filters before the plan is built, so it moves the sequence numbers.
- Read the plan. Edit any target, clear the Keep box on any file, and press Restore to put a computed name back exactly.
- Take the renamed copies as a zip, or take the plan as a text file. Both are blocked while any collision is unresolved.
Useful for
- Number a shoot into shoot-001, shoot-002 and so on, then fix the two frames that need a different name without rewriting the rule.
- Strip a suffix such as _final from a folder of exports and see immediately that two of them would then have the same name.
- Date-stamp a set from each file's own modification time, in the exact format the rest of the pipeline expects.
- Check a rename plan before running it on a machine, because the plan text is the same plan the command line tool prints.
Limits worth knowing
- This page cannot rename the files on your disk. It produces a zip of renamed copies and a plan you can act on. Renaming in place from a browser exists in one engine only and is not offered here.
- The date token uses the file's modification time, which is what the browser exposes. The capture date from EXIF needs the command line tool.
- The folder token needs the folder button, because files chosen one at a time do not carry a folder path.
- The plan table stops drawing at 500 rows. Rows past that are still in the plan and still in the zip.
- Collisions are checked against the set you chose. A file sitting in the folder that you did not include cannot be seen from here.
Questions people ask
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