A Better Finder Rename

A good friend George turned me onto a re-makable piece of software last week for renaming files. For mac based photographers that have to rename files it is really an interesting choice. A Better Finder Rename allows you to rename file in a variety of ways. Need to remove digits at the beginning of an entire folder of images? No problem! Need to rename the images based on an spreadsheet? Can do!

George photographs products for his company and works in web design. He had an image list of products that he needed to rename with the item barcode in the company database. Column A in the Excel file was a list of images with the names the camera gave them. Column B is a list of coinciding bar codes. By exporting the Excel file to a simple unicode-8 text file he is able to rename all 1200 images instantly rather than having to manually cue in every single new name.

This is extremely useful for companies and with some of our recent projects where we have 9500 images that had to be renamed 3 different ways for different usage scenarios, A Better Finder Rename made the work a whole lot easier. 

I will say that it takes a perfectionist to make it work though. You have to figure out the path to the images in your computer system and attach that path to Column A in the spreadsheet prior to running the program. If your path is even one digital or letter off, you will find yourself researching over an over with a brain teaser on what you did wrong. But, none the less, it works and can save you ridiculous amounts of time and energy on those tedious renaming operations and conventions.