rename

Photo editing can be an extremely tedious and time-consuming process. Fortunately, many editing tasks can be performed automatically using batch-processing programs. BatchPhoto Enterprise is an easy-to-use program that can correct, adjust, resize, crop, and otherwise edit groups of images. It's not perfect, but we don't think we've encountered many programs that are more versatile and intuitive than BatchPhoto Enterprise.

BatchPhoto Enterprise opens with a wizard that walks users through the process of getting acquainted with the program, and copious documentation is provided, including video tutorials. Once we started using BatchPhoto Enterprise we were surprised by exactly how … Read more

Scarabee Software's Siren is easy-to-use but powerful file-renaming freeware. It quickly renames, moves, or copies selected files using expressions you create. Suppose you want to rename all the images in a folder sequentially. Instead of manually renaming each in sequence, Siren can do the whole batch at once. It displays image previews and tags to help you be sure you've got the right files.

Siren is portable freeware that runs as soon as you click the program file without having to be installed or registered in Windows. When we first opened the program, a "first contact" … Read more

If you have a digital camera, it doesn't take long to fill your PC with lots and lots of high-quality images, some of them huge in size. Fortunately there's no shortage of free photo-resizing software, ranging from small and speedy tools that emphasize automatic operation and batch conversion to full-fledged graphics tools rivaling some pricey packages. EasyNote's PhotoTrim definitely hews to the simple-is-better philosophy, offering basic settings and speedy batch conversion as well as some compression. Unfortunately, it's not exactly free: you have to register to unlock "advanced" features such as cropping. Add in … Read more

Often when managing collections of files in the OS X Finder, you may find that giving the files unique or patterned names may help in your organization. For instance, if you have a set of image files it may help to quickly append a date or sequential number to the file name; to do so manually might take a while.

At other times, you might wish to quickly append a time stamp or other similar attribute to a file name without having to manually edit the name. As an example of this, if you use the OS X compress feature (… Read more

Microsoft does listen to user feedback, at least when it comes to fine-tuning some of the features in Windows 8.

Through their Building Windows 8 blog, the folks in Redmond have worked to reveal changes in store for Windows 8, notably in the area of file management. Among them are improvements to the cut, copy, paste, rename, and delete commands; refinements for file collisions; and a new look and feel for Windows Explorer.

In reaction to those blog posts, more than 2,000 users chimed in with suggestions for further tweaking the new file management. And Microsoft apparently listened.

Detailed … Read more

Anyone with a digital camera knows that the file names that are automatically assigned to your images are often jumbles of letters and numbers that don't tell you anything about the images themselves. For that reason, file-renaming tools have become pretty popular; they let users rename batches of images using words or dates that give meaning to the file names. Unfortunately, Image Renaming is one of the less elegant tools for this task that we've encountered. It works, but it's not particularly intuitive.

The program's interface is less than welcoming, consisting of a blank gray screen … Read more

Batch file renamers have been around for a long time, but MP3s and digital cameras have made them very popular indeed. Aaron Stewart Batch File Rename is a free file renamer with which you can create, combine, and save as many rules as you need to rename large batches of files automatically. It can handle extremely long file names, up to 32,000 characters, as well as MP3 and EXIF tags.

Aaron Stewart Batch File Rename's user interface is busy but well-designed, with a central file list above the rules configuration sections. The program opens with the New Rules … Read more

When you're faced with renaming large batches of files, you have some options. We think you could do worse than to put Advanced Renamer Portable (ARen) on the job. It's portable freeware that can add, remove, replace, append, and otherwise alter the names of large batches of files or folders. It uses several renaming methods, including options designed specifically for multimedia files like images and songs. Since that's what most people seem to have the most of on their system, we like the program's emphasis.

ARen's interface is cleanly configured with grayish-brownish tones similar to … Read more

Ever find it frustrating trying to copy or move files in Windows? Then some long-overdue improvements in Windows 8 should be welcome news.

Admitting that file management or the "copy jobs" feature now in Windows can be confusing, Alex Simons, a program management director on Microsoft's Windows engineering team, yesterday revealed four enhancements destined to surface in Windows 8.

Contributing to the latest installment of Microsoft's ongoing "Building Windows 8" blog, Simons said that copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files are the most heavily used features in Windows Explorer, accounting for 50 percent of … Read more