Quickly re-name your files with Mess Rename

February 7, 2008 by Kiltak |

By reading the title of this post, most of you probably thought “Why the hell is he posting about that, does he think we’re idiots who can’t rename a file?”, and normally, you would be right to think this. But when I stumbled on this utility, I knew everyone would love it, especially those of you who take billions of pictures every week with their digital camera.

Mess rename is a cool little renaming tool that takes 3 seconds to download, 2 to install and 1 to use… no manual required. The only thing the software does is take a bunch of files and rename them according to certain rules. Remember the 600 pictures you took at that last party you went to? Remember how painful it was to rename every single picture file to make them sound significant after dumping them on your hard drive? With Mess rename, you won’t have to do this anymore. Renaming those P039*.jpg files to something like party2008_(1,2,3…).jpg will now take you seconds.

Do you know about any similar tools? Which one do you use? Let us know in the comments!

[Via La Chronique de Nelson [French]]

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8 Comments »

Comment by LethAL

2008-02-07 07:59:37

I’ve been looking for a simple tool for this for a while; this seems to be what I’m looking for, thanks!

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Comment by tom Subscribed to comments via email

2008-02-07 10:36:07

I’v been using a perl script called rename (http://search.cpan.org/~pederst/rename-1.4/) for while.

You use perl regular expressions.

rename ’s/^([1-9])/0\1/’
put a leading 0 on all numbered files not starting with 0

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Comment by Marc-O

2008-02-07 11:55:31

I’m using a function of filemenu tools to do that job, software I found on this excellent blog:

http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/07/change-right-click-options-with-filemenu-tools/

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Comment by Homercleese

2008-02-07 17:43:13

I use Lupas Rename 2000 for bulk renames. Not all that pretty to look at but free,, and has a lot of functions.

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Comment by AskTheAdmin Subscribed to comments via email

2008-02-08 07:23:20

I use straight windows and no 3rd party applications. A fellow blogger showed me the light. You can do it in any Windows file browser by selecting all your files right clicking the first one and making a slight modification. It will propagate down the line incrementing as you go.

Check out the full details here:

http://www.asktheadmin.com/2007/12/i-have-hundres-of-files-to-rename-help.html

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Comment by Christian Kirchhoff

2008-02-08 07:24:49

I prefer the Bulk Rename Utility. It seems it has like the biggest number of options and possibilities for changing filenames.

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Comment by Lee McKusick

2008-02-09 17:01:51

If you have it, Adobe Bridge will also allow you to do this.
Batch Rename, under Tools (or Ctrl+Shift+R) will bring up a dialog box that will rename, move and rename, or copy and rename, and you can customize the resulting filenames in a ton of different ways (include folder name, metadata, etc).

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Comment by Chris

2008-02-18 06:57:57

IrfanView will also bulk rename files, both through it’s GUI and it’s CLI mode. I used to use it extensively until I ran across BulkRename, as mentioned earlier. It’s massive and very intimidating but once you get used to it, it’s cool.

This one does look super simple, though. I wonder if it required installation or if it’s portable.

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