Have you ever come up with a situation where you have a batch of files, which you need to rename according to a pattern, or according to file names from a list. I do. And I do often.

Consider this scenario. You downloaded a bunch of video files or episodes off the Internet, and you want to rename them to something meaningful. Like from “S01E08_Episode_Released By_XYZ” to “1×08 – Episode by XYZ”.

Now, doing this rename operation on one file manually is alright. Doing it for 100’s of episodes? I guess no one is ready for this. Anyways, for this situation, a very useful and friendly application is needed. It’s called ReNamer by Denis Kozlov.

There are tons of freeware batch-renamers out there, but I found ReNamer to be the friendliest of them till now, and my personal favourite. I thought that it would be nice to share it with you.

How to use ReNamer:

1. Open the folder which contains your files to be renamed. In this case, “MyFiles”.

2. Open ReNamer, and place it in such a way where you can see both ReNamer and the MyFiles folder. Side by side works best.

3. Select all the files you want to rename, and drag them over to ReNamer, and drop them on the box which says “Drag your files here”.

4. Now ReNamer is really powerful, and can do many many kinds of rename operations on files. I’m going to demonstrate how to rename files according to the scenario above. Feel free to experiment by yourself and check out the Help if you are stuck. Renamer is easy to use, so I doubt you will have difficulties.

4a. Now, click on the Add button, marked by a blue + sign. The window you see allows you to add renaming-rules to the files you just added.

4b. Briefly,

Insert allows you to add a piece of text or number as prefix or suffix to the filename. Eg. If you want to add “Myfile” to the start of every file, you can add it in the “what:” box, then select prefix as the option.

Delete allows you to delete the existing filename, from a position to another one. The most frequently used is From position: 1 Until “till the end”.

Remove allows you to remove parts of the filename. Eg. Remove a word from every file name. Useful if you want to remove, say a URL, from every file-name, but keeping the rest of the filename intact.

Replace is similar to Remove, but instead of deleting parts, it substitutes that part with something which you specify.

Extension allows you to rename the extension of files in batch. Often used with Delete, but with the “skip extension” checkbox unchecked. This removes the whole of the filename, then adds a new extension after your specified filename.

Strip allows you to remove specific characters from the existing filenames. Like, remove all numbers, brackets and other characters which you can specify.

Case allows you to change the case of the filename. You could, for example, turn “filename.txt” into “Filename.txt” or “FILENAME.txt” easily with this tool.

Serialize is very useful, and allows you to add a count to filenames. Eg. file01, file02, etc. Be sure to enable the “Pad to length: 2” if you are going to use more than 10 files, and pad to 3 if more than 100 files. You can also generate random numbers if you want.

CleanUp is like the Replace rule above, but is already pre-configured to replace some characters with space, for example.

Translit, RegEx, PascalScript are for more advanced uses, requiring scripting knowledge. I’ll leave these out, since they are not used very often by the average user.

UserInput is very useful, if you want to specify how the files will be renamed. Eg. If your episodes have names, you can have them here.

Now, you know a bit more about the rules, let’s get back to the scenario. I have this bunch of episodes (which are in fact text files which I will use, instead of video files) that I want to rename to a particular format. So here goes:

I’ll be using: Insert, Delete, Serialize, UserInput. These are the most-used according to me. Case is also commonly used for beautifying things up. It’s not being used here though.

I want the files to be renamed to this format: “1x(episode number) – (Episode Name) – Released By XYZ”.

5. I add a Delete rule to delete the existing filenames. You will probably get a warning about existing filenames. Ignore that for now. Add button – Delete from the left list, configure it as in the picture, then click the big “Add Rule” button.

6. Then is the episode Name. This uses UserInput. I created dummy names like First Episode, Second Episode… UserInput needs to be used first since it overwrites the rest of the rules. You can also insert from a text file, from the Options button just below the insert box.

Mind you, the order of added rules is important! If things are not working well, try re-ordering the rules using the Up/Down buttons near the Add (+) button.

7. Then is the episode numbers. This requires Serialize. The settings are below.

8. Next, I add an Insert rule to add that “1x” to all the filenames, as prefix. Mind those spaces. They make the filename easier to read.

9. Finally, I add the Released by XYZ.txt as suffix. I had to add .txt because the UserInput rule overwrites everything.

My final rules are as follows. You can see that the “New Name” field has changed to preview the new names.

10. Voila! My files are renamed as I wanted them, in simple steps. Now, you could save those rules for later use, using the Presets menu, and Save As command. Presets can be applied via Load submenu in Presets menu.

The trick with ReNamer is that you need to play around a bit until you get what you desire. The rules may not be applied in the same way every time, and it all depends on your tastes. So, feel free to experiment.

Ps. Another very useful feature is to add folders as files, which allows you to batch rename folders. For this to work, ensure that Settings menu – Settings – Add Folders as Files is checked. Then, just drag-and-drop your folders into ReNamer, and add the rules, just as you would for Files.

If you want to add the contents of folders, instead of the folders themselves, you will need to disable the “Add Folders as Files” checkbox again.