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Batch Rename
**Function:** Renames the selected files (or files in the selected folders) based on the user-set preferences.
**Author**: Automator World
**Notes**: It works best as a Contextual Menu Plug-in; copy into ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/. It also works well as an Application for drag-and-drop use.
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Awesome! Who needs to buy “Yet Anther Finder Rename” when you got this? It’s all I needed. Thanks! And so simple!
Comment by Jason Anderson — May 12, 2005 @ 7:14 pm
fantastic!!! this is the best automator work flow i have used. very user friendly and simple. A+
Comment by Joshua — May 25, 2005 @ 1:20 am
Worked like a charm!
Comment by Avijit — June 9, 2005 @ 11:20 pm
How about an automator workflow for batch changing the created/modified date? Any ideas how can this be accomplished?
Comment by Marius — July 2, 2005 @ 8:40 pm
Crap…This doesn’t work for me!
Comment by Blaha — July 4, 2005 @ 12:13 pm
This would be the killer action if it could read EXIF headers of JPG and RAW files to rename… just like the EXIFRenamer app only easily inserted into workflows. I’d pay for that.
Comment by andrew — August 13, 2005 @ 7:46 am
WIth this:
http://www.automatorworld.com/2005/08/12/photoshop-cs-automator-actions/
you can batch rename files based on EXIF..is this what you mean?
Comment by Steve — August 13, 2005 @ 9:44 am
Am I missing something here? To me it looks like a two item workflow of actions that automator already has which i could throw together in about 10 seconds. I don’t see anything more powerful than the regular automator renaming actions. Is this download just for people who don’t even know how to drag actions into a very short list or am I missing something that this can do?
Comment by Jay — August 14, 2005 @ 3:30 pm
You seem to have missed nothing. :)
Comment by Steve — August 14, 2005 @ 3:33 pm
The CS actions require Photoshop to open and rename each file (slow, and inefficient) and don’t give me enough detail in the filename. I would need filenames with hour-minute-second like this:
05-0113-184445.jpg
(YY-MMDD-HHMMSS)+ext
Not that the CS extensions don’t kick ass… but having photoshop open every file just to rename based on EXIF headers seems a bit like spreading butter on toast with a jackhammer ;-)
Comment by andrew — August 14, 2005 @ 8:13 pm
I agree with the comment made by Jay. This is nothing fancy. How do I make a workflow that accepts input to replace any text (wildcard) and append a sequential number after the input? That would be cool.
Comment by lipids — August 26, 2005 @ 8:28 pm
Can anybody tell me how to get this to rename folders as well as file names?
Comment by symm — September 6, 2005 @ 2:06 pm
Symm – just add as the first step “Get Selected Finder Items”. This will rename everything selected.
Comment by Steve — September 6, 2005 @ 3:02 pm
Thanks, but it still didn’t quite work. If I have ‘Repeat for each subfolder found’ checked, it goes into all the subfolders and renames all the documents, but not the folders. When I unchecked ‘Repeat for each subfolder found’ it renamed the folders as well, but only at the top level. :( I’ve tried different combinations of these actions to try to get this to work, but no luck. For the record, what I have is a set of predefined folders and documents for a project template with a placeholder name in front of each folder and document. I want replace all the placeholder names with a real name for every new project. (I’m using A Better Finder Rename now, but wanted to see if Automator could handle this for me instead.)
Comment by symm — September 6, 2005 @ 4:43 pm
Ah yes– I recall discussions on this a while ago, and don’t recall if there was any solution. I think the consensus was that this is either an Automator bug, or should be a preference like “rename subfolders”.
Comment by Steve — September 6, 2005 @ 5:22 pm
Here’s what I figured out so far if this helps anyone. Maybe someone could help me.
Use this workflow to get the same effect I think you’re trying to achieve:
‘Get Selected Finder Items’ > ‘Rename Finder Items’ | ‘Get Selected Finder Items’ > ‘Get Folder Contents’ > ‘Rename Finder Items’
So here’s how it works. I select some items in the finder then execute the workflow. It takes whatever is selected, which could be some root folder, and renames it. That effectively fixes the problem where only the contents of the folder are renamed. Then the input of the second ‘Get Selected…’ is cut off. Now the ‘Get Folder Contents’ gets all the contents of the selected root folder. Then you can rename that.
Here’s my problem. When you try a rename that Changes the Case, and you want to do it in-place, then OS X throws an error that the filename already exists. I figured out that it’s because OS X is trying to do an alias of the filename instead of actually renaming it like Windows would do. So, I’m confused, but I hope I helped at least a few people.
Comment by Eric — September 7, 2005 @ 8:57 pm
It only happens over a network drive by the way. And it’s not just a permission thing because I can rename the file to a different name. It has to do with how the mac handles the rename. It’s a copy, and since in windows case doesn’t matter, you need to be able to overwrite automatically. So what I’m now proposing is to copy the contents locally, renaming, then overwriting the file as I think an action for that already exists.
Comment by Eric — September 12, 2005 @ 8:13 pm
If you want finder to ask you what to rename the files (plus add a number or whatever you’ve already specified) click the “Show Action when Run” option in the workflow.
Comment by Daniel Ryan — September 25, 2005 @ 8:13 am
Great workflow; I have over 7,000 digital pix that I need to name, let alone rename. Thanx
Comment by Guy — November 7, 2005 @ 8:58 am
Can anyone point me to a workflow that will append the name of the folder the file resides on to every file in that folder? (and do it for every folder inside a chosen directory)?
Comment by Celo — December 18, 2005 @ 11:42 am
Does anyone currently have a workflow that can remove text from the end of a name based upon a number of characters to be removed, i.e. a file named PhotoFLeft3235.tif is there a way to automatically remove that last 4 digits from a batch all having 4 unnecessary characters on the end?
Comment by Jeff Gonick — March 21, 2006 @ 5:25 pm
R-Name will allow you to remove a specific number of characters
Comment by H. Gregory Porter — March 22, 2006 @ 1:24 pm
Comment by taiski — April 13, 2006 @ 7:04 pm
sorry, my error, i meant:
Can anyone point me to a workflow that will append the name of the folder the file resides on to every file in that folder? (and do it for every folder inside a chosen directory)?
this is exactly what i’ trying to do/find!
Comment by taiski — April 13, 2006 @ 7:05 pm
PLZ show me a way to rename the file by exchanging last part of the text with the front part..i.e. “X&Y – Coldplay.jpg” to “Coldplay – X&Y.jpg”
Comment by Peter Han — May 8, 2006 @ 11:15 pm
Taiski –
OMG…did you figure out how to do this?? This would be such a help for our photography assistant. We photograph multiple products for catalogs and we need to save each jpg with the name of the product sku in the title so then the designers know what product is which.
Problem is…we shoot multiple photos of each sku and the time it takes our photo assistant to go back and rename all these is ridiculous. She names the folder with the SKU but then drops all the individual photos in there (named Untitled_001, Untitled_002, etc)…so if Automator could rename the individual jpgs with the folder’s name and leave the stuff after the underscore, that’d save her hours!
Thanks!!!
Joshua
Comment by Joshua — May 30, 2006 @ 2:23 pm
Gorgeous lil App. Fair enough, give anyone an hour and they could make it themselfs, but why bother when we have automator world!
If you wanted you could make it a folder action (i think) and make a folder add the date/time to anything put into it. Same as having an App to drag n drop into, except you can put this in your sidebar.Nice lil app though
Comment by Pete — June 1, 2006 @ 9:05 am
I cant find many automator actions for ical, in particular adding templates to the notes section.
Ideas where to look?
Comment by Mark Cooke — June 11, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
Does anyone know how to do the next task in the workflow.
I get 5 different report files daily, from 5 companies. The important thing is, all files have different names and different extensions.
Let’s say name1.aaa, 2name.bbb, na3me.ccc …and so on.
Is it possible to rename just the first part to something i write in, and leave the extension as is?
So, let’s say i’d selected the 5 files, ran the workflow, and the window would pop up, asking me for the first part of the name, the files will have (without the extension). I would then write “foo”, and the files would then be renamed to: foo.aaa, foo.bbb, foo.ccc …and so on.
Is it possible to do that?
Comment by Ales — December 21, 2006 @ 8:16 am
When I try to do it I get this error:
Finder got an error: Can’t get properties of alias
Comment by Robert Perry — January 21, 2007 @ 3:19 pm
I’m pretty sure there’s a bug that prevents renaming files that are on external drives. Try it, plug in an external drive.
Find Finder Items (select a folder on the external drive)
Rename Finder Items (whatever)
Then run it. I constantly get the error. ‘Finder couldn’t get the properties on the alias’ or something, yet no alias exists.
If I copy the same folder to my main HD the scripts runs perfectly. Not a permissions issue either.
Comment by mark — February 2, 2007 @ 6:14 pm
please god help me, i have 500 files in 20 different folders. the folders are all labelled individually but the 500 files have a single name and a sequential number between 1 and 500. i need to rename all 500 files their repective groups and in sequntial order. (so every folder has “folderA_01 , folderA_02……” and the next folder will have “folderB_01 , folderB_02 ….”
i could replace the text but each file is currently labelled “example_01 , example_02 all the way thru to example_500” so i cant just ‘replace text’ as there are the numbers 1 – 500 to contend with. why the heck is automator so useless?
HELP!
Comment by becky maynes — April 27, 2007 @ 10:10 am
I’m quite a newbie to scripting so this might sound a bit stupid. I’ve downloaded the Batch Download Workflow and saved it as per the header said ie Library>Workflow etc etc. How do I add this to my right click menu? I had it on my previous macbook but now ive upgraded to a Pro and I have no idea. Guess I shouldnt be using a Pro eh? Please help
Comment by Mark — July 21, 2007 @ 1:51 pm
How can specify casesensitive rename to make every second character of word found to be caps n replace rest with small caps? like if file name is “sabi sin” after rename it should look like “sAbi sIn”.
nehelp?
Comment by SAbi — August 11, 2008 @ 4:50 am
OH DEAR LORD THANK YOU. I was trying to make this myself, but did not succeed. Thank you so so much.
Comment by Kristan — November 23, 2008 @ 9:44 pm
How to “Rename from IPTC” ?
This action disapear since action pack v3 and didn’t work anyway under 10.5.6 with CS3.
Help please !
Comment by M Plumet — January 15, 2009 @ 7:11 am
[…] Batch Rename Instead of getting a special renaming utility, you can use this workflow to do various things like append words to filenames or completely rename them. […]
Pingback by Using Automator to complete mundane tasks | Smoking Apples — June 12, 2009 @ 11:56 am
[…] one file at a time. If you’ve ever had to do this manually, you know what a pain this is. Batch Rename makes this painless on selected files and everything within selected […]
Pingback by Ten Awesome Automator Tricks - Interrupt19 — June 22, 2009 @ 8:01 am
anyone know how to do a grep rename? that feature seems to be absent.
Comment by Waffen Hussein — July 21, 2009 @ 11:00 am
Is it possible to do a batch rename using a spread sheet? I have alot of files i need to rename, but they file names are all over the place.
Comment by Kristy — August 3, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
Thanks for this!! Saved me so many hours this morning!!
Comment by snowy — August 20, 2009 @ 2:53 pm
Great App, thank you.
2 comments:
1. the app seems to quit (or at least immediately and prematurely ‘complete’) of its in own accord in some circumstances. i think it’s when the combined path in the directories chosen is too long. is that right?
2. a ‘save config’ would be lovely. I wanted to add the date in a specific format to thousands of files which I had to do in chunks (because of the note (1) above, I think) – and I had to set each of the six drop down menus manually each time.
thanks again
Comment by mindig — October 4, 2009 @ 10:18 am
Recently I download a cute small software, Rename Now, and tested it. Very funny and simple. Maybe this one can also help me to rename my huge and messed files in my computer besides the way above. Anyway, so thanks for your sharing!!
Comment by mandy — January 6, 2010 @ 11:13 am
It looks like there is a problem with the “repeat for subfolder” option not renaming the sub-folders themselves but just renaming the files in the sub-folders (see comments #14 and #15 in this thread).
My simple workaround was to just filter the set by “find finder items” and exclude a non-existent filename. It worked like a charm – see this post for details and a screenshot:
http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2010/01/20/design/tech/batch-renaming-files-and-all-sub-folders-with-macs-automator
Comment by thinksketchdesign — January 20, 2010 @ 1:56 pm
[…] Automator? Batch Rename | Automator World Komputer: Macbook White + PC + SG Indy + Gadżety… Cytuj […]
Pingback by Zmiana nazwy wielu plików. — May 25, 2010 @ 1:16 pm
Works like a charm! Thanks.
Comment by Ian — May 27, 2010 @ 10:46 am