Our digital cameras are excellent tools in capturing memories in both still photographs and videos but the filenames that they come with can be a little cryptic as they usually just come with some static characters such as DSC or IMG_ followed by a sequential running number.

If you have a couple of photos, firing up the Finder app and renaming the photos one by one would do the trick. However if you need to change a few hundreds to thousand photos, it can become a chore. There has to be a better way.

In MacOS, you will find a nifty app called the Automator which can do a whole range of things and one of which is the ability to batch rename files.

The above is the set up we could use for a pretty basic filename renaming which is to tag a Prefix and in this case “Day At the Zoo” followed by a running number which is padded to 4 digits.

Setting Up the Automator

After you launch Automator, select “New Document” followed by selecting “Workflow” as the Document type.

Drag the photos you want rename to the empty right pane and under the Library on the left pane, select “Rename Finder Items”. There you can set up the different actions which is to “Add Date or Time”, “Add Text”, “Make Sequential” and many other options.

Click the “Run” button on the top right to start the process.

The Automator is a nice handy tool but if you need a little more complexity such as to tag a Suffix, you will need to run the above automator workflow, reload the renamed files and set up the “Add Text” process.

There has to be a better way

We thought long and hard about this and came out with CM Batch Filename Changer which is not only easy to use but complex enough to provide you with the options to arrange the filenames as you want.

The above shows the same up in our app to do the same tagging of the prefix “Day At the Zoo” and tagging a padded running number to the filename.

We added the option to include macros which are placeholder text in curly brackets. The advantage is that you can set up the filename as you want it to be.

The above screenshots show up to set up the Date as the Suffix to the filename. We went a little further and provide you with the option to set up the Date Format (In fact two different date formats)

In our app, there is the option to Preview the New Filename before applying it. This lets you work with the different controls to see if it works for you before applying it.

We feel that the ability to rename files as a basic necessity especially when working with huge number of files that apart from our standalone app CM Batch Filename Changer, we included this feature in our flagship Photo Processor, CM Batch Photo Processor and our Batch TIFF & PDF Converter.

Our solution starts at US$3.99 for CM Batch Filename Changer which we feel is a great time saver. Download our 14 Days Trial Version and give it a spin.