The shift from film to digital photography fundamentally changed the way we work. Many things changed but one the the key things that stayed the same is the need for organization and management of the multitude of images we capture.
One of the corner stones of a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system is the file name. Having a good naming convention facilitates being able to gather much information about an image without even having to open it. There are certain conventions that are recommended as a start for certain situations, but ultimately the convention a photographer chooses will be unique to what their system requires. The biggest problem to overcome once a system is decided on is the efficient renaming of hundreds if not many thousands of images. This is why utilities such as A Better Finder Rename (ABFR) exist.
ABFR simplifies the renaming of huge amounts of files by simply setting up a set of rules that the new names have to follow, and the applying those rules to a specified set of files. A lot of programs integrate file renaming systems into their workflow, but are often limited. ABFR it sets itself apart from other solutions is with the sheer number of ways it can modify the names, the way it integrates into the OS and the way it can string multiple sets of rules together to allow really complex name changes.
One of ABFR’s strengths is speed.
You simply start with a selection,
activate the optional hot-key combo and the program quickly loads with your files loaded and ready to be renamed. Upon opening the program you are presented with the main window. This is where the renaming rules and options are defined.
There is also a preview window that shows exactly what will happen to the names after the operation completes.
The portions of the interface that will get the most use are more than likely going to be the “Change” and “Action” drop-down.
The “Change” drop-down lets you specify the part of the name that is changed.
While the “Action” drop-down lets you choose how to modify the selected portion.
As you can see, the list is extensive. The attention to specifics doesn’t end there, as this screenshot of the options for “Rename to date/time” demonstrates.
ABFR is advertised as being made with the input of photographers and content creators in mind, and the options in the above dialog alone tend to show that commitment. I won’t show the drop-down individually, but suffice to say that each option is extensive and allows for a huge amount of customizability, and that’s only for renaming to dates.
Underneath the options section is a third area of the screen that has several options that once set, won’t often be switched. One of particular interest is “Activate multi-step interface.” This opens a drawer on the side of the window and makes it possible to set rules to follow other rules, in case the built-in functions are not usable for the naming convention.
For example, let’s say your naming convention uses a month’s name instead of just its number. The default “Rename to date/time” options don’t allow for names. Getting around this is not very complicated. I just click the little plus sign at the bottom of the multi-step drawer to add a second renaming function to run after the first.
In this function, I want to replace the month number with its name. In my selection, the images were taken in July, and the first naming rule formats them as MM-DD-YYYY. So if I tell it to replace the text 07 with the text July the files names will change, but there’s a slight problem. When the time starts hitting the seventh minute of the hour the text also matches 07 and is replaced. This puts “July” in odd places in some file names.
There is a simple fix. In the “Action” drop-down I change “Replace text” to “Replace Text at beginning.” Now once the first change is made, the rest of the name is ignored.
If I wanted to get even fancier, I could define regular expressions as rules, or I could use external files to define lists, as ABFR imports Excel among other formats. Speaking of lists, it can even save the names out as a list, if for some reason you need to keep a record of what the files used to be named, or for other even more esoteric requirements.
Other notable features include the ability to read embedded AAC/MP3 info and use it to rename the files and a way to save frequently used renaming rules out as droplets for easy drag and drop operation.
In my experience ABFR has been fast and stable, with the exception of a strange bug I discovered that can possibly crash the app on both PPC and Intel machines. When resizing the preview window when not attached to the main window as a drawer, the windows start stacking oddly, and repeated movement can under some circumstances cause a crash. This is not something that can damage files, at most it can wipe out any setup time you spent on making rules. Frank very quickly responded to my communication about this issue and continued until it was narrowed down. Support like this is rare these days, and is one reason why often I find myself spending relatively small amounts of cash at small developers that respond to my concerns and suggestions rather than large corporations that can’t feasibly do so. As of this writing the issue is still unresolved, but does not cause crashes unless I try to make them happen. In that time I have used ABFR for renaming everything from the screengrabs for this post to over 7000 still images used in sequences for broadcast compositing without issue.
A Better Finder Rename is written by Frank Reiff and can be downloaded here: http://publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/
The cost is $19.95 and the license is tied to the user, meaning that you can install it on as many machines as you want, as long as you are the only one using the software.
It is a Universal Binary, and weighs in at a relatively svelte 5MB when installed.
The demo period is not time limited, but does limit the amount of files you can rename at once to ten.
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