A Better Finder Rename Reviews

I hear you and I do like giving people what they are asking for.

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 A "long lived" undo on the other hand would risk being out of date quickly.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.

@Publicspace.net (Developer), thank you for your lengthy reply. I appreciate it. For the time being, I will be remaining with File Buddy, because I believe it has a lot more functionality than ABFR.

The app does give you a preview of the new file names before it renames them. Of course, you should already be using Time Machine for other reasons, but it'll also give you the undo you seek.

FYI, preview and undo are not the same.

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.

Do you use this for renaming photos? Does it have capabilities to rename photos using EXIF? Do you use another application for that?

I have just finished prepending (is that a word?) 61,000 files with the EXIF date and a space; so - where I had a file named "Big Rocks", it's now named "201211171405 Big Rocks". YYYYMMDDSS (24 hour clock) helps me organize my library by date.
You'll find it under Date & Time/Add date/time to beginning.

Best program I've ever used.

I've been trying ExifRenamer and NameChanger. Both of these I can not figure out.. Operator error I'm sure. And a Terminal based one called Exiftool... way over my head, although very powerful.
I'm trying to name a file: P101-11234 to 20171231-Market-152113.
Any guidance on using an app for this? Mac of course :)

"I'm not buying apps that charge everytime Mac upgrades. "

Fact, ABFRX 8 was released in early 2008, the current macOS at the time was 10.5 Leopard. ABFRX 9 was released in Feb 2012. That's a four year spread between releases. ABFRX 10 was released in OCt 2015, also just shy of a four year spread. So macOS has gone from 10.5 to 10.12, seven major releases, in the same time only 3 releases of ABFRX. IMO that doesn't seem like a 'charge every time Mac upgrades.' And as you say yourself, version 9 still works great in latest macOS, which is great, and I would expect (wink wink) that your version 9 will still work in 10.13. If you had purchased version 9 when it first came out in Feb 2012, you'd still be using the same app now over 5 years later, for just an initial investment of $20.

I agree there are A LOT of companies that do excessively charge for updates every time Apple sneezes, but PublicSpace I don't think falls in that group.

Well it is > 30%. I find the tool invaluable, a hint... You can use the Audio Tag tokens for Movies too.