A Better Finder Rename

There is a category of Mac app that does one boring thing extremely well, and this is the canonical example. You drop in 4,000 photos, tell it to name them by the date each was taken plus a sequence number, watch the preview column fill in, and commit. If you got the pattern wrong, one undo puts every name back.

The metadata rules are what separate it from a free script. It can read EXIF capture dates, camera and lens fields, ID3 tags from music, and it handles the fiddly cases — numbering that pads correctly, find-and-replace with regular expressions, inserting or stripping text at a position, case conversion that does not mangle extensions. Droplets let you freeze a working recipe and reuse it by dragging files onto an icon.

Pay attention to the update policy at checkout. Standard is the cheaper default and is version-locked; Forever costs more and genuinely means it. For a utility you will still be using in eight years, Forever is the honest buy and the reason this app belongs on this site at all.

If you rename a folder of files twice a year, macOS has had batch rename built into Finder since 2013 and it is adequate. This is for people renaming files weekly, in volume, to a pattern.