A Better Finder Rename
11.11File, photo, and MP3 batch renamer.
Overview
A Better Finder Rename is the most complete renaming solution available on the market today. That's why, since 1996, tens of thousands of hobbyists, professionals and businesses depend on A Better Finder Rename to organize and maintain files.
The Instant Preview feature eliminates guesswork and costly errors and helps you find the right settings quickly and accurately by providing as-you-type feedback.
A Better Finder Rename offers a complete set of renaming options that are organized into 15 categories covering all the text, character, position, conversion and truncation features that you would expect from a file renamer, but it does not stop there. The multi-step renaming feature allows multiple renaming steps to be combined to deal with complex renaming jobs in a single operation. Unlike other tools, A Better Finder Rename allows any number of renaming actions to be combined, re-ordered, copied and deleted.
What's new in A Better Finder Rename
- The new release adds a filter criteria to limit renames to files with a valid EXIF timestamp.
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A Better Finder Rename Screenshots
- Intel 64
- OS X 10.10.0 or later
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167 A Better Finder Rename Reviews
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File Buddy is similar to ABFR and has a lot of great features and functions, some of which ABFR may not have. However, I would seriously consider switching to A Better Finder Rename if -- as other commenters note below -- it incorporated an undo option.
Sometimes we make mistakes, or perhaps change our minds about a naming change. When you are working with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of files, as I do, being able to undo a change on multiple files becomes very important. Developer, please consider implementing undo in ABFR. Thank you.
Unfortunately, while an "undo" feature sounds great and somewhat obvious, it is not the silver bullet that one might imagine.. it would only be an "undo*" (* within system limits, with a long list of assumptions) and as such it would give you a false sense of security.
The "normal" undo feature in an application relies on the assumption that the application has total control over the data and that those operations are revertable only in the same backwards sequence. Also generally when you quit the application, the undo history is lost.
A Better Finder Rename is not the only application that has access to the file system. Far from it. After you perform your rename, you are free to move files and folders, changes names manually, make copies, duplicates, etc.. other programs can manipulate the file system, etc.. all without A Better Finder Rename's knowledge or consent.
Worse than that, if your files are not on a standard APFS or HFS+ file system (NTFS, FAT, NAS, etc.), the new names that A Better Finder Rename requests for your files may not actually be the ones on the file system. Most third-party file systems are mounted via file system drivers that do their own name translations. If you use non-standard characters such as emoji (or accents, umlauts, some punctuation, etc), for instance, the APIs may report that the name change was successful, but the real name on the file system would be different. That makes reversing the change impossible.
A successful undo could thus only be guaranteed on the assumption of a standard file system and nothing having changed since the rename was performed. The sell-by date of that kind of undo would be very short. If you quit the program, it would be gone. A "long lived" undo on the other hand would risk being out of date quickly. If an undo was attempted but failed, it would leave your file system in an unconsistent state, which could be far, far worse than not having an undo at all.
I don't think it is a good idea to include a feature that can only work some of the time, but would have potentially grave consequences if it goes wrong and it would be very hard to communicate those limits properly. Users would expect the feature to work every time and they would be right to be mad when it has worked on dozens of previous occassions, but suddendly stops working.
By far the best way of avoiding renaming problems is to spot problems BEFORE you perform the changes, and that is exactly why A Better Finder Rename goes to such extreme lengths to preview and confirm those changes. An undo feature may sound great, but it just couldn't be 100% reliable and would have the potential of leaving your file system in a huge mess.
As I think you might have noticed, it is not as if I had never considered adding an undo. I think I could even do a fairly decent job at it.. a fairly nifty version of it was on the initial scope for v11.. but it would not be bullet proof.. it would give a false sense of security.. and it would fail for some users, some of the time for entirely valid reasons that those users would be not at all interested in.. and in my book that makes it a bad idea.
Normal best practices for important data have always applied to critical files: Make backups, use version control (or something like Dropbox which has built-in versioning). Moreover, the file name is rarely as important as the file content. If the file names are crucial, you can also use the "save file list" feature to create a permanent record of the name changes, just in case.
I know that is not the answer you want, sorry.
That's unconscionable in a seasoned app like this, and is vital!
Even Path Finder has that available for its renaming window, and renaming is just a secondary function, not its PRIMARY JOB!
Sometimes after renaming I find I want to rename differently, but I can't start over without undo.
And no, I haven't used TM in years.
I use SD or CCC for frequent clones.