Select the files, press Shift+F2, describe the change once, and watch every new name appear in a table beside the old one. Nothing is renamed until you apply, conflicting rows are flagged and skipped, and the entire batch undoes with one Ctrl+Z.
What it does
- Find and replace, or regex. Literal or regular-expression find with capture groups, optional case-insensitivity, applied to the stem, the extension or the full name.
- Counters.
{n},{nn},{nnn}with a configurable start and step, sequenced by selection order, name, date modified or date taken. - Case, crop, affix. Upper, lower, Title Case or Sentence case (Unicode-aware, so Cyrillic re-cases correctly); remove N characters from the start or end; add a prefix and a suffix. Applied in a fixed order — replace, re-case, trim, wrap — so one recipe can do all four.
- Metadata tokens. Dates from the file (
{date},{time},{YYYY},{MM},{DD},{HH},{mm},{ss},{created}), from a photo’s EXIF ({taken}and parts), from audio tags ({title},{artist},{album},{track},{year},{genre}), plus{parent}for the folder name. An unavailable value stays literal, so you can see it did not resolve. - Live validation. Windows-invalid characters, reserved names and collisions are flagged per row; checkboxes exclude rows.
- Saved recipes. Save the complete configuration — find/replace, flags, scope, case, counter, crop, affix and numbering order — as a chip and re-apply it in one click later.
- AI suggestions. With an AI provider configured, a Suggest names row with an instruction box fills the same table with proposed names and a confidence chip each; they apply through the same preview and undo.
- One undo. Apply records a single undo entry; Ctrl+Z reverses every rename, including swaps and cycles.
How to use it
- Select the files (or use flat view to gather them from subfolders) and press Shift+F2.
- Type what to find and what to replace it with — or leave Find empty and pick a case, a crop or an affix. Watch the New column update as you type.
- Add a counter —
{nnn}— and choose its order; add{taken}for photos or{artist} - {title}for music. - Check the table for red rows, untick anything you want left alone, and Apply. If it was wrong, Ctrl+Z.
- Doing this every week? Save recipe.
A single file renames in place with F2 — the row becomes an editor, the stem is pre-selected, and Esc cancels.
How the tokens are read
EXIF dates and camera fields come from a JPEG’s APP1 block, audio tags from the head of the file (ID3v2,
FLAC and Ogg Vorbis comments, MP4 ilst atoms), all read through the same provider that lists the file —
so the tokens work for files inside an archive or on an SFTP server too. Values are fetched once when the
studio opens.
What it deliberately does not do
- It never applies a row it cannot validate. Conflicts and invalid names are shown, not guessed around.
- ID3v1 (tail) tags, an MP4 whose metadata is at the end of the file, and TIFF/RAW/HEIC EXIF are not read yet; those tokens stay literal for such files.
- Recipes are labelled by their content (
find → replace,title · +v_…), not by a name you give them.
Related
- Undo and the safety net — why one Ctrl+Z covers the whole batch.
- Views, columns and thumbnails — flat view, for gathering files across folders first.
- AI assistant — where the name suggestions come from.