Better Rename 9 App Reviews

Better Rename 9 is buggy. It would be most useful for large numbers of files, but thats exactly where it falls down. If you feed it too many files at once, it will get stuck in a loop where it tries to count up the items to rename, but just keeps counting to infinity. You are stuck waiting. Worse, the "OK" number of files varies wildly. Sometimes upwards of 10k are fine, sometimes it has to be lower. You cant tell if it is going to fail until it counts all the way up. Ive hit this bug across multiple OS versions, multiple computers, and multiple Better Rename versions. The bug has been around since version 8 at least, and remains unresolved, despite the fact that it has been reported and that it has a major impact on the usability of the program. The presence of a giant, obvious bug like this for so long shakes my confidence that this program is actually renaming everything correctly. Additionally, the interface for saving/reloading rename operations is clumsy and awkward. Overall, I gave it a 2. It works to rename files, at least sometimes, but it is frustrating and difficult to use due to a poor design and bugs.

First off, DO NOT PAY FOR THIS APP. Too bad there are no NEGATIVE STARS. After downloading over a hundred apps and being an avid Mac user for many years, this is the worst waste of my money ever. I feel it important to encourage others to NOT PAY FOR THIS APP. Why? Well at first I thought the app was great; it renamed files, had a nice interface and you could use multiple steps to modify file names. Then after renaming about 20 files, the app crashed. This app crashed every time I renamed files, the rename would work, but then the app would crash. I would louse all my rename steps and have to start all over again. So I thought maybe I could save my rename steps, well no luck there either. Crash, crash, crash, force quit, force quit, force quit, re-boot. All for $20. Then I find an app that does nearly the same thing for $0.99. It is times like these that I believe Apple made a huge mistake by not allowing refunds for APPS that do not work. Keep in mind if this app did not crash every time you renamed files and actually allowed you to save your rename steps as it claims to, the app would actually be useful and worth a few bucks. But right now, be warned; don’t make the mistake I did. Do not believe all the 5 stars.

Ive used this app for years. Sometimes in its free form (they limit you to 10) and Ive bought it various times as well. It saves me a lot of time. $20 is a pretty trival amount. Seems like many folks dont remember what software used to cost and now expect everything to be 99 cents or something. I really dont understand the negative reviews. This app is a utility and its worth the price even if you need it for only one big project.

After seeing all the low ratings, I thought I needed to chime in. Ive been using the application for a while now and found it to be very intuitive to use and extremely powerful. I am trying to live a paperless life and just kicked DEVONThink to the curb and replaced it by a simple folder structure. Renaming files to follow a certain pattern is really easy to do with this application, especially if you need to do something that would take a long time to set up in Automator or would otherwise require command-line tools using regular expressions. Take for example a case where files are currently named BANK_STATEMENT_UBOC_MM_DD_YYYY.pdf and youd rather have them be named YYYY-MM-DD - Statement - UBOC.pdf. Using this app, its simple to do this using a combination of built-in actions and the regular expression module to move the date into the desired format. If you need to do this several hundred times, you will appreciate what this app does for you and wont be whining about having spent $20. I am certainly not using the app to its full potential, but am always amazed at what it can do if I need to use it. Somebody mentioned that the tags renaming is not useful. I would strongly disagree. Every now and then, I export images from my Lightroom library to share with family and friends. I use Better Rename to rename the images according to a useful pattern, rather than leaving them in the cameras own naming convention. Its super cool that you can access EXIF information and make it part of the files name. The app does indeed crash every now and then, so this is something the developers should be working on.

Renamed over 10,000 in no time with multi step scripts. This app removes the grunt work in creating apple scripts to do the same thing.

If you are a pro you need this app. Dont worry about the price it is well worth it. Presents are excellent. Ive created on for timestampgin and adding "H4N to Zoom H4N audio files. I can drag in a folder with files buried many folders deep and only rename the files. Note that the Mac App store version doesnt have the ability to create droplets, but it is not a signifigant issue because right-clicking in the Finder works well.

The multi-step UI is weak. It almost seems like an after-thought (who still uses drawers?) and its way too easy to click the wrong tiny icon and delete one or most of your steps with no undo.

I use this application mostly with my image files. I have set up a few defaults to automatically pull information from the exif data and name my files correctly. It really is powerful in all that it can do. Fairly easy to use and just works. I have only taken off a single star for a couple of things that dont take away from its abilities, but are instead just some things that would make it perfect. - Let me hide the multistep drawer despite having multi steps. - Allow me to hide (shrink) the left side of the application. Give me a place to just drag - drop - then click a button to rename. Once I have my defaults set up, I really dont need to see the window, but I DO need to see the current name / change to section. - I have noticed a fair amount of lagg when dragging files from a finder window to the application. When I drag the files on top of the application the whole computer appears to slow down (Retina MBP). As soon as I let go, it speeds right back up. This is a great program if you need to perform some batch renaming. It is part of my image sorting workflow. Thanks!!

Ive been using this app for a couple of days on OS X 10.8.4. Works very well and saved me a lot of time. Thanks for the great app.

I give this app a reluectant 5 stars. It’s a good app, quite possibly the best for Mac, but its GUI could be improved. It has a little higher learning curve than it needs to have because it is hard to find some functions in its drop-down menu. All negative criticism aside, it does everything it claims to do - it renames files using a wide variety of options. I’ve used it for almost a year now, and it is a fine program. It’s worth the price depending on the amount of money you have to spend.

This app is super easy to use and very powerful. I highly recommend it!

So, after 30+ years, I’ve moved from Windows to Apple. The prospects of Windows 8 plus my last two years experience with iPhones drove me to it. But, my new Macbook Pro won’t show me date taken or a lot of other Exif metadata from my thousands of photos and it does not allow me to easily rename batches of photos. I have filed my photos by "date taken/subject/id#” for ages. What can I do? Thankfully I found Better Rename v.9. It does it all exactly the way I need it, quickly and easily. Okay, if you are an OSx newbie like me, there were a few problems. Nothing worked. Select 500 photos in a folder, set up the app to rename them, and, BAM, I am asked to re-enter my administrator/usesr password for each and every one of the photos! This is Mavericks doing this, not the app. So, I close the app and go to the folder level, unlock it, change the permissions to let everyone read and write and tell it to apply this to “enclosed items”. Doesn’t work. Tried selecting all the photos and changing their permissions ala Windows. Won’t let me. Won’t let me unlock them without entering my password for each one. Finally, I found that, while Mavericks doesn’t tell me its doing it, it was apparently making the changes I selected, silently and secretly, in the background. Once I found that Mavericks may be doing things slowly and without telling me, I realized that Better Rename was doing exactly what it claims to do and doing it well. I have now changed thousands of names with no further problems and have no worries about the thousands left to do. Now, I just have to find the right app to see ALL the Exif metadata and to change or delete it for pics I may want to make public. There seem to be more faked apps in those categories than there are reliable ones. But, after many nights of working with my photos, I find Better Rename to be just great.

point blank, this saves a lot of time with the batch processing and ease of use. Smart tool.

I’ve been using Better Rename for years, across several versions. I couldn’t be happier with this app. It is constantly being improved, and some of the newest features are great. The quick-rename droplets are a small miracle some days too. Thanks for keeping it going!

I suspect droplet capability has been removed, even though it’s in the help file and all the marketing material. Using the latest version 9.30.

I dont usually write Mac App reviews, mostly because software in general tends to be a disappointment. Its rare when Im pleasantly surprised. Better Renamer truly lives up to its name. I have used one previous renaming tool, but then the company just stopped making it / supporting it, and it no longer worked on Mountain Lion. So I tried a bunch of the renaming tools on the MacAppStore. When I got to using this one, I stopped looking -- this one is the real deal. It does EVERYTHING I would want in a re-naming tool, and then some. Again, I very rarely feel my money was well-spent on an Mac App Ive bought. This one delivers. Im 200% happy with it.

I depend very heaviliy on the droplet capability. It’s just not there. It’s in the help notes and the screenshots on the support page. They do not match the this version of the application. I’m just one customer, but please fix that issue and it’s a solid five stars.

This is an outstanding product that does exactly what it was designed to do — rename many, many files, very very quickly. With its powerful regular expression engine, there really are no limits to what you can do with Better Rename. I just tossed a few hundred text files at it, all of which had different methods in the file name for showing creation date. Using the regex, I standardized/rearranged the date format in every single file name in a matter of seconds. Even if you have no/little exposure to regex, Better Rename makes the process pretty seamless, and gives you a preview of what will happen to the file names before you commit to the process. Just a fantastic app.

You can rename a photo file name but when you add the file to iPhoto the name reverts to the original.

This is one of the apps I use most. Saves so much time when I want to rename multiple files. Very easy to use. Just a great app all around.