30 Day No-Hassle Money Back Guarantee, all purchases include discounted upgrades and we offer site and forever licenses.
Purchase an upgrade to version 12.
Download A Better Finder Rename 12.12
for Intel & Apple Silicon Macs, requires macOS 10.15 or later.
Download A Better Finder Rename 11.62
for Intel & Apple Silicon Macs, requires macOS 10.13 or later.
Download A Better Finder Rename 11.53
for Intel & Apple Silicon Macs, requires macOS 10.10 or later.
Important Note for Droplet Users! macOS 15 Sequoia will tell you that all your droplets are 'damaged'. Don't panic! This is a new macOS security feature. Full details are available in on the Droplets and Sequoia help page.
12th November 2024
The new version addresses a minor bug affecting the presets popup window in Sequoia.
25th September 2024
The new version adds a new droplet setup help message for Sequoia.
19th September 2024
The new version fixes a minor bug with the presets popup menu.
15th August 2024
The new version:
8th August 2024
The new version adds tags for file name and file extension.
3rd July 2024
The new version features improved keyboard navigation via the tab and shift-tab keys.
5th June 2024
The new version features improved keyboard navigation. The return key will now more consistently trigger the rename in all actions, and you can use the arrow up and down keys to change integer values.
24th April 2024
The new version adds a new action that removes emoji from file names.
29th November 2023
The new version now properly displays the command window in dark mode.
13th November 2023
This new version fixes a few minor bugs.
23rd October 2023
This version
12th October 2023
This version makes a few post-launch improvements
11th October 2023
This is the first release of version 12 of A Better Finder Rename. You can get an overview of what is new.
Version 12 of A Better Finder Rename is now available! Check out What's New or Download the Trial for free. Version 12 and version 11 can be installed side-by-side without issues.
11th October 2023
The new version alerts the user to the availability of version 12, which features many improvements focused primarily on professional media workflows.
1st March 2023
The new version introduces a new web-based help system.
15th February 2023
The new version fixes a minor bug.
4th February 2023
The new version delivers another minor bug fix.
2nd February 2023
The new version delivers a minor bug fix.
18th January 2023
The new version adds a warning when creating a droplet on Ventura.
29th December 2022
The new version fixes a minor highlighting bug.
15th December 2022
The new version adds support for hif files.
30th November 2022
The new version adds the ability to filter on image comments.
24th October 2022
The new version adds links to support material for droplet problems introduced by new macOS 13 Ventura security warnings.
5th October 2022
The new version adds the ability to migrate droplets to presets.
27th July 2022
The new version features a number of minor improvements and lots of behind the scenes changes.
If you're not already familiar with filter actions, you might want to watch the new How To Use Filter Actions YouTube Video.
29th June 2022
The new version adds support for iXML meta-data in RIFF sound files.
31st May 2022
The new version enhances the first launch experience.
18th May 2022
The new version enhances the lexical case conversion action with support for verb contractions.
26th April 2022
The nev version fixes a case conversion bug that would cause the program to block when certain special characters were present in the file name.
15th April 2022
The new version fixes a dark mode bug.
6th April 2022
The new version adds a few minor improvements.
22nd February 2022
The new version further improves performance and memory utilization.
26th January 2022
The new version is a minor bug fix update.
5th January 2022
The new version adds the ability to decode percent encodings.
15th December 2021
The new version fixes a metadata reading issue.
8th December 2021
The new version adds an action to strip leading spaces.
26th October 2021
The new version delivers a fix for a bug that could crash the application under a particular set of circumstances.
12th October 2021
The new release fixes a rare crashing bug introduced in version 11.37.
Special thanks to Jerry for helping me debug this problem!
9th August 2021
The new version rolls back some changes that appear to cause crashes with international character sets while we investigate.
4th August 2021
The new version improves change highlighting.
2nd June 2021
The new version adds support for IPTC location tags, such as city, state and country.
20th May 2021
The new version fixes a bug in the filter action interface.
12th May 2021
The new version allows the camera body serial number to be included in the file name.
29th March 2021
The new version adds yet more tweaks to the the meta-data extraction engine.
17th March 2021
The new version further improves the meta-data extraction engine.
4th March 2021
The new version significantly improves the reliability and performance of the meta-data extraction engine.
3rd March 2021
The new version adds image caption, keywords and user comment tags for improved renaming of images from Photos.app.
4th February 2021
The new version fixes a minor bug in the preferences dialog.
8th December 2021
The new version adds Apple Silicon native droplets.
30th November 2020
The new version adds support for reading pdf creation dates.
20th October 2020
The new version:
8th October 2020
The new version adds Big Sur compatibility and fixes a locale specific meta-data bug.
16th September 2020
The new version fixes a minor bug in the info pane.
1st September 2020
The new version fixes a bug affecting filter actions under macOS 10.11.
6th August 2020
The new version fixes a bug with the alphabetical sequence actions.
8th July 2020
The new version supports a wider range of movie content creation timestamps.
16th June 2020
The new version fixes a minor bug in the parent folder action.
19th May 2020
The new version fixes a bug that affected filtering with the sort-each-folder-separately option turned on.
4th May 2020
The new version improves text highlighting in dark mode.
23rd April 2020
The new version resolves a rare caching problem.
9th April 2020
The new version features performance and reliability improvements.
11th March 2020
The new release unlocks correctly for Better Rename 11 Mac App Store customers.
4th March 2020
The new release improves the remove a range of characters action.
14th February 2020
The new release adds a filter criteria to limit renames to files with a valid EXIF timestamp.
7th January 2020
The new release fixes a text encoding bug that affected ID3 music meta-data tags and improves the processing of Spotlight meta-data.
4th December 2019
The new version fixes a meta-data error.
4th December 2019
The new version fixes some stepper controls on macOS 10.15 Catalina along with some minor bug fixes.
25th November 2019
The new version fixes a multi-threading bug in the new meta-data extraction code.
20th November 2019
The new version:
20th November 2019
The new version:
5th November 2019
The new version:
29th October 2019
The new release fixes a problem with the ISO values reported by the tool.
23rd October 2019
This is a quick bug fix for a display bug introduced a few hours earlier in 11.01.
23rd October 2019
This release fixes a resizing bug that affected users of smaller screens.
15th October 2019
This is the first major new version upgrade since version 10 was released in 2015.
The new release features file filtering, greatly enhanced presets, meta-data support for many new file formats (including PDF, Microsoft Office documents, a myriad of video formats and much, much more).
This is a paid upgrade for anybody who does not own a forever upgrade or has bought after the 1st of January 2019.
It is a pleasure to continue developing this product for you, its users, so please support me by purchasing an upgrade. Thanks!
7th October 2019
This is the fourth and hopefully final release candidate for version 11 final, so if you are waiting for other people to report problems with the betas, gives us a shout at support@publicspace.net, so that we can get any issues fixed before the release!
This release fixes the tags displayed during MP3/AAC renames.
1st October 2019
In this release we are solving a problem with the sequence number user interface going out of step with the actual settings.
30th September 2019
This is the second release candidate for version 11 final, so if you are waiting for other people to report problems with the betas, gives us a shout at support@publicspace.net, so that we can get any issues fixed before the release!
25th September 2019
This is the first release candidate for version 11 final.
This latest beta:
10th September 2019
This beta fixes an endless loop bug that accidentally made it into yesterday's beta 14. Sorry!
9th September 2019
This latest beta version delivers two significant bug fixes affecting filter actions and general speed issues.
2nd September 2019
The new beta:
26th August 2019
This 12th beta delivers a new lexical case conversion action that allows words to be capitalized, lowercased or uppercased depending on their lexical category, e.g. nouns, verbs, etc.. complete with a list of words to exclude.
It also fixes the intermediate results preview column when using filter actions and updates the help book.
5th August 2019
The 11th beta delivers a number of improvements and bug fixes:
27th July 2019
Beta 10 is the first fully notarized version of the tool in preparation for macOS 10.15 Catalina.
If you want to get information about the launch later this summer, please subscribe to our newsletter.
22nd July 2019
Beta 9 introduces the long awaited auto-increment counters for generating successive sequence numbers over multiple sessions.
8th July 2019
This new beta
3rd July 2019
This new version fixes the new filter actions.
1st July 2019
The new version makes major changes to the multi-threading of the database access and should fix a bug where A Better Finder Rename would crash after performing the rename stage correctly. It also introduces undo support for edits within the multi-step rename interface.
26th June 2019
The previous beta performed only a partial migration of droplets to v11. This version fixes this.
If you have used the droplet migration in the File menu on the previous betas, you need to re-run it on each droplet that you want to be linked to v11.
24th June 2019
This latest beta makes a number of big improvements.
19th June 2019
The new beta fixes a crashing bug, improves the "Make Sentence Case" action and fixes the intermediate result column when using multiple filter actions.
18th June 2019
The new beta improves dark mode support for the new presets sidebar.
17th June 2019
This is the first public beta version of the upcoming version 11.
15th October 2019
This is the last 10.x update now that Version 11 is out
13th September 2019
The new version fixes a crashing bug introduced in the previous update.
31st July 2019
The new version is now fully notarized and fixes a minor preview bug.
25th June 2019
The new version fixes a rare crashing bug affecting the remove trailing spaces action.
5th June 2019
The new version improves the handling of sub-second timestamps.
20th March 2019
The new version fixes a display issue on macOS 10.14 Mojave.
7th March 2019
The new version adds support for CR3 raw image files and 35mm equivalent focal lengths.
16th January 2019
This is the first French language localization of the product.
We have done our very best to make this a great translation, but as this is our first attempt there are likely to be some isolated translation errors, oversights, etc.
We would really appreciate it if you could let us know of any issues you might run into or improvement requests that you might have immediately so that we can correct them.
Please contact Frank Reiff directly and we will get a fix out asap.
This new version also includes improvements to the German localization, bug fixes and changes to the internals of the droplets.
4th December 2018
This is the first version of A Better Finder Rename to be localized for German-speaking markets.
6th November 2018
The new version now deals gracefully with incorrect sub second shooting timestamp.
10th October 2018
The new version adds meta-data support for TV shows, episodes, seasons, networks and studios.
3rd October 2018
The new version features improvements in meta-data extraction.
21st September 2018
The new version now supports dark mode on macOS X 10.14 Mojave (Hurray!).
5th September 2018
The new version uses the sub-second EXIF timestamp when this is available in the source files.
26th July 2018
We recently became aware of a situation that could cause droplets to fail frequently on macOS 10.13 systems that have had dropbox installed, even when dropbox is no longer active.
If you are on macOS 10.13 or later and have ever had dropbox installed, you may experience intermittent droplet failures and have to drag & drop items on a droplet twice.
In this case, you can use the "Migrate Droplet..." feature in the "File" menu to migrate your droplet(s) to the latest version, which works around the file synchronization problem that causes the problem.
5th July 2018
The new version features an improved unlock experience.
30th May 2018
The new version adds support for the album artist mp3 meta-data tag.
25th April 2018
The new version makes it easier to toggle the clear list setting from the preview table.
14th March 2018
The new version addresses a number of minor issues.
28th February 2018
The new version solves a minor cosmetic issue introduced by the latest High Sierra update.
31st January 2018
The new version introduces support for the new HEIC and HEIF image formats.
9th January 2018
The new version sorts the Presets menu in alphabetical order.
7th November 2017
The new version delivers a minor bug fix.
11th October 2017
The new version remembers whether the preview pane was toggled off across sessions.
12th September 2017
The new version further bullet-proofs the unlock mechanism against recent changes in how macOS treats preferences files.
18th July 2017
The new version adds the Lens Make tag.
5th July 2017
The new version improves the unlocking experience.
13th June 2017
The new version prevents newly created droplets from showing up is the "Open With" Finder dialog.
16th May 2017
The new version deliver minor improvements and bug fixes.
6th April 2017
The new version fixes a crashing bug when adding files that occurred on some Mac configurations.
29th March 2017
The new version adds new file size tags.
8th March 2017
The new version improves error reporting.
10th January 2017
Removes the automatically added window tabbing menu item on macOS 10.12 Sierra and restores fancy drawing for all stepper controls.
13th December 2016
The new version fixes a cosmetic bug on macOS Sierra.
15th November 2016
The new release fixes a crashing bug in the preview pane.
September 6th 2016
The new version delivers some under the hood improvements to drawing code and stepper implementation.
2nd August 2016
The new version fixes a bug when adding MP3 tags to the end of file names.
26th July 2016
The new version makes some internal changes for better future proofing.
7 June 2016
The new versions adds the ability to export and import presets to enable easier sharing between team members.
13th April 2016
The new release adds the ability to move ranges of text.
16th February 2016
This new release adds experimental support for FLAC audio files.
2nd February 2016
This release fixes a software update vulnerability in the Sparkle framework that was exposed on the 29th of January.
13th January 2016
This release adds the ability to toggle the preview pane on and off, as well as a lot of under-the-hood changes.
8th December 2015
This release fixes a code signing bug that was reported a few hours ago and prevented version 10.01 running on some systems.
This issue may also prevent auto-update from working on 10.01 and mean that you may need to manually update your copy by downlading the program from the A Better Finder Rename main page.
Sorry for the inconvenience, I'm preparing a blog post about this issue to at least explain what went wrong.
This release also contains a few minor improvements around the upgrade experience and further modernizes the code base to offer a good platform for further development.
1st December 2015
This first point update collects a number of minor internal and external changes.
21st October 2015
Version 10 is the first paid upgrade to A Better Finder Rename since February 2012 and features a host of usability improvements.
24th September 2015
This new beta fixes a number of minor bugs:
22nd September 2015
This new beta makes a number of improvements:
16th September 2015
This beta introduces the "This Action" preview column that appears when more than one renaming action is active and displays the intermediate results of just that action. This makes it much easier to see the effect of a single action in a multi-step rename.
The column shows the file name as processed by the previous action and the result of the currently selected action and highlights changes between them.
The second beta also contains some bug fixes and aesthetic refinements.
3rd September 2015
This is the first public beta release of version 10 of A Better Finder Rename.
You can check out the feature list on the A Better Finder Rename 10 Beta Release page.
21st October 2015
Minor release notes version 10 has shipped.
7th September 2015
Minor release notes version 10 beta 1 is out.
29th July 2015
This release improves behaviour when an attempt to rename files on read-only media is made.
10th June 2015
This release fixes a minor bug and features a lot of behind the scenes changes.
28th April 2015
This release improves the startup behaviour.
24th March 2015
This release fixes a bug in the regular expressions implementation.
17th March 2015
This release modernizes the preview table implementation and fixes a number of minor bugs.
17th March 2015
This release was only out for a few hours and contains a major bug. Please update to version 9.48 or later to correct this.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
25th February 2015
This release refines the preferences dialog.
11th February 2015
This release adds a new tag that allows users to insert the contents of the clipboard into file names.
22nd January 2015
This release fixes the "Show Invisibles" preview option that allows you to see invisible characters, such as spaces and tabs.
3rd December 2014
This release fixes a multi-threading issue.
19th November 2014
This release fixes a sorting bug related to Yosemite's sqlite database.
5th November 2014
This release adopts a new "flatter" look to blend more easily with the refreshed Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite user interface.
The new look is only applied on Yosemite, so the application should look much the same on older Mac OS X versions.
24th September 2014
This release features a major overhaul of the music tag renaming actions.
The user interface is brought in line with the "Tag-Based Renaming" actions and now features a drag & drop based token interface.
We have also added a number of advanced AAC and MP3 tags to the tag library.
20th August 2014
This release makes a minor improvement to the "Change Existing Number" action.
28th July 2014
This release solves a rare crashing bug.
22nd July 2014
This release adds online crash reporting to help us more quickly identify stability issues in future.
18th June 2014
This release improves stability under heavy load.
We appear to have had some issues due to changes in how Xcode's LLVM compiler deals with multi-threaded memory management.
A great thank you to the people who have quickly reported these issues. Please remember that we can only fix bugs that we know about and that some bugs simply do not occur on all Mac models and configurations.
Please let us know immediately if you find a crashing bug, so we can react quickly!
17th June 2014
This release fixes an intermittent bug that has been causing trouble for many users.
It looks like this was a multi-threading bug that has been around since version 8.0, but never manifested until the latest Mavericks updates.
We are genuinely sorry for any inconvenience caused.
5th June 2014
This release ensures that A Better Finder Rename will retain its file selection when you auto-update in the future.
6th May 2014
This release fixes inaccuracies in the progress reporting.
19th March 2014
This release improves droplets on Mavericks.
27th January 2014
This release is the first to adopt the modern Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) memory management architecture and thus benefits from significant performance gains in some areas.
14th January 2014
This release introduces the new <ShootingDateSubSecond> tag.
10th December 2013
This new release makes a series of small enhancements and minor bug fixes.
20th November 2013
This new release fixes a minor bug that could make A Better Finder Rename fail without an error message.
15th October 2013
This new release finally retires our beloved multi-step action drawer and replaces it with a more modern design.
23rd September 2013
This latest version fixes a bug in the "Keep Specific Characters" action.
14th August 2013
This latest version adds the ability to display invisible/ non-printing characters in the file name preview.
16th July 2013
This release adds a shortcut for going full screen.
2nd July 2013
This release adds keyboard shortcuts for removing individual items from the preview list and for clearing the entire list.
18th June 2013
This release makes it easier to join our new opt-in mailing list.
11th June 2013
This release improves the unlocking mechanism to handle additional special cases.
6th March 2013
This release adds support for reading meta-data tags in a variety of video formats.
30th January 2013
This release adds support for the global position system (GPS) tags in photographic images.
15th January 2013
This release delivers some UI improvements.
28th November 2012
This release fixes a manual sorting bug.
18th October 2012
This releases adds the ability to limit file names to a specific set of letters.
12th September 2012
This releases fixes a number of minor improvements and fixes.
21st August 2012
This is a bug fix release.
20th August 2012
The new version improves integration with the Mac App Store version.
2nd August 2012
The new version automatically upgrades old droplets to the new Mountain Lion-compatible version.
31st July 2012
This latest update fixes a startup problem.
31st July 2012
This latest update fixes an intermittent droplet problem on Mountain Lion affecting some users.
Update: This problem was fixed with the Apple's 10.8.1 update.
3rd July 2012
The new version is ready for Mountain Lion.
26th June 2012
The new version optimizes drawing and artwork for the new MacBook Pro Retina Display.
The 9.07 update substantially reduces the download size, which ballooned up to 24Mb due to the larger artwork and is now back down to 5.7Mb.
26th June 2012
The new version optimizes drawing and artwork for the new MacBook Pro Retina Display.
20th June 2012
The new version improves the manual ordering feature by letting you drag multiple items in the preview simultaneously.
15th May 2012
The shooting date now defaults to the "Time Date Digitized" timestamp if neither "Time Date Original" nor relevant TIFF information is found.
18th April 2012
The new version enables you to automatically migrate presets from version 8.
In order to use this feature, go to the "File" menu and choose "Migrate Version 8 Presets...".
7th March 2012
This minor update fixes a problem that would make the "drag your files and folder here" graphic appear blurry in certain situations.
1st March 2012
You can now automatically migrate the droplets that you created with version 8 to the new version by selecting "Migrate Version 8 Droplet..." from the "File" menu.
29th February 2012
A Better Finder Rename 9 features a beautiful, re-designed single window user experience, the abilitity to re-order items in the preview list via drag & drop and it provides acess to over one hundred image, photo, color, camera, lens, music and date meta-data tags.
This is the first full version update of A Better Finder Rename since 2008 and we hope you will enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed developing it!
29th February 2012
This version is primarily aimed at delivery to existing users via the auto-update feature and provides information about the version 9 upgrade out today.
4th January 2012
The new version if necessary attempts to perform renames using a range of different renaming mechanisms to ensure better compatibility with third party and remote file systems.
6th December 2011
The new version fixes a bug in the id3 tag reading engine.
2nd November 2011
The new version now supports full screen mode in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
19th October 2011
The new version improves the thumbnail preview in the confirmation dialog and squashes a potential crashing bug.
Note: Version 8.90 was only released on the App Store, but contains only a partial fix for the crashing bug mentioned above. It should make this issue much less frequent but does not totally eliminate it. Version 8.91 will be submitted to the Mac App Store today, but will need to go through the approval process which can take up to two weeks.
28th September 2011
The new version adds the ability to expand camel case.
8th September 2011
This new version makes a very minor change to meet Mac App Store submission guidelines.
7th September 2011
This new version fixes a minor problem with the new music tag reading engine.
17th August 2011
This new version adds support for reading music meta information in FLAC, AIFF, M4V, OGG and APE files.
20th July 2011
This new version introduces a new "Lion mode" for renaming files more efficiently on Mac OS X 10.7.
This mode is automatically pre-selected when the program is first run on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
14th July 2011
The new version fixes a problem that would cause the new ID3 tag reading engine not to find track number and CD number information.
12th July 2011
The new version adds a new ID3 tag reading engine that can process your music files up to ten times faster than the old engine.
15th June 2011
The new version deals more gracefully with symbolic links.
10th May 2011
This release improves the way that progress information is displayed:
The new version also contains a number of minor bug fixes.
20th April 2011
This release fixes a crashing bug reported yesterday and a cosmetic problem.
6th April 2011
This is a maintance release addressing a number of minor issues.
9th March 2011
This release fixes a color space problem that made some JPEG file previews seem hazy and makes a number of minor tweaks now that new A Better Finder Rename 8 releases have abandonned Leopard-compatibility.
28th February 2011
This is the first Snow Leopard only release of A Better Finder Rename. The internals of the program have been thoroughly modernized and a lot of Mac OS X 10.5 legacy code has been removed in preparation for work starting on ensuring that A Better Finder Rename will be fully Mac OS X 10.7 Lion-compatible.
15th February 2011
This release adds an option to allow the logging of debug information to the console to be switched off. We recommend that you leave this switched on as it greatly facilitates debugging and helps us provide you with a bug-free product.
This is also probably going to be the last Mac OS 10.5 Leopard compatible release.
We usually support the current version of Mac OS X and one previous version to allow customers plenty of time to upgrade.
Apple has, however, made a number of moves in the last few weeks that make it harder than ever to maintain backwards compatibility. The Mac App Store requires that code be targeted to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Apple's XCode 4 development tools that have gone to Gold Master last week have dropped the Mac OS X 10.5 SDK and PowerPC support entirely.
We now spend a lot of time maintaining backwards compatibility and separate code bases and A Better Finder Rename is dragging a lot of legacy code, such as preferences panes, contextual menu plug-ins and PowerPC compatibility around with it.
In other words, the time has come to get ready for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and drop Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard compatibility a few months early.
Obviously, the current, I hope you'll agree, very capable 8.76 release will remain on the website indefinitely and we've made sure that the auto-update feature won't overwrite your current version with an incompatible Mac OS X 10.6-only version by mistake.
For Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users, the next few point releases will deliver a smaller, faster and modernized A Better Finder Rename.
29th January 2011
This is a minor release making it easier to purchase from the Mac App Store.
26th January 2011
This release adds the option for new users to buy A Better Finder Rename 8 from the Mac App Store.
A Better Finder Rename is now available on the Mac App Store under the name "Better Rename 8".
Apple asked us to change the product name to remove the "Finder" reference.
A Better Finder Rename 8 will continue to be available from our own web site and we will obviously honour forever upgrades and continue to offer discounted major upgrades and bundles. In other words, nothing will change for existing customers nor will new customers be treated any different.
The decision to buy on the Mac App Store or directly from us is a matter of your personal preference. We are happy either way.
Please understand that if you buy from the Mac App Store, you buy into Apple's way of running things and we us developers have very limited influence over how Apple manages the Mac App Store.
19th January 2011
This release adds two new text moving actions:
23rd December 2010
This release fixes the droplet feature which was broken amid Mac App Store changes for version 8.71. Sorry.
14th December 2010
This release delivers the first installement of new text moving actions.
10th November 2010
This release makes performance and memory management improvements.
13th October 2010
This release makes further improvements to the unicode handling.
30th September 2010
This is a minor update that:
15th September 2010
This release adds new options for inserting space saving alphabetical sequences into file names.
6th September 2010
This release fixes a bug in the 'Insert Sequence Number At Position' renaming action introduced in the last release.
25th August 2010
This release adds the abilitity to insert file path components to the front or the back of existing text or at a particular position.
11th August 2010
This release introduces a new category of renaming actions allowing you to insert path components in a variety of ways.
21st July 2010
The new release improves the compatibility of the "rename from file list" feature with tab delimited text files exported from Mircosoft Excel.
14th July 2010
The new release adds new renaming actions to the folder name category:
23rd June 2010
The new release fixes a rare crashing bug.
2nd June 2010
The new release provides three additional ways of inserting roman numerals into file names:
10th May 2010
The new release updates the help book with advice on how to best handle very large renaming jobs.
20th April 2010
The new release allows the automatic loading of EXIF information for image files to be switched off.
This can result in a huge performance boost for all renaming actions that do not require this information, especially when working with large files over a network.
Disabling the feature will, however, lead to incorrect sorting when using the EXIF information.
Our advice would be to leave the option switched on unless you are looking at very large jobs over a network.
13th April 2010
This new release adds an option to disable the Quick Look thumbnail creation for the confirmation dialog.
While it can be a great help to see a thumbnail of each picture or document that you are about to rename, if you are working with very large file sizes (e.g. digital camera raw files, medical scans, huge PDFs, etc.) or with files on a slow server, the thumbnail creation can become very slow.
As this is not such a common scenario, by default thumbnail creation remains switched off.
For those special jobs, however, where the thumbnail creation process is slowing you down, you can now disable it in the "Preferences..." dialog and you will be presented with the item's icon instead.
7th April 2010
This release adds support for random sorting in the sequence number, roman numerals and alphabetical sequence renaming actions.
23rd March 2010
This release fixes a minor bug that would allow the multi-step drawer to be closed but not re-opened under a set of infrequent conditions.
10th March 2010
The new release allows droplets to be locked so that they cannot be edited by double clicking them. This can be useful for system administrators who need to distribute droplets to end-user and want to avoid them being edited by mistake.
3rd March 2010
This release adds a new action that removes all diacritical marks (accents, umlauts, etc) from file names.
24th February 2010
This release further improves the handling of international character sets and fixes a minor bug.
2nd February 2010
This release adds a new "Replace using regular expressions" action to the "Advanced & Special" category that acts in a way familiar to most software developers and unix geeks.
The action that was formerly known under that name is still available as "Re-arrange using regular expressions" and continues to work as before. You should not have any problems with your existing droplets or presets.
Please note that regular expressions are an advanced feature, that may be completely unsuitable for casual computer users. They are very powerful, but basically also represent a particularly cryptic programming language in their own right and have a big learning curve. The documentation links to external resources for learning about regular expressions.
29th January 2010
This new release fixes a problem introduced by the additional safety checks in version 8.49 released two days ago.
The problem occured only when you were attempting to change the case of a file name (e.g. convert to uppercase, lowercase, sentence case). In this scenario version 8.49 would refuse to rename the file because a file of the same name already existed (HFS+ is case preserving but not case sensitive).
27th January 2010
This is a recommended update for all 8.x users. It fixes an extremely rare but potentially serious bug.
20th January 2010
This is a minor update that removes the current restriction of the step value in the sequence number actions having to be no greater than 255.
6th January 2010
This new version replaces the old RegExLib regular expression library with its modern RegExLibLite counterpart that uses the ICU library that is built into Leopard and Snow Leopard. This should result in faster regular expressions processing and more elegant international character set handling, as well as cutting down on the application size.
The next version of A Better Finder Rename 8 will deliver further enhancements based on this new library. There are detailed differences between the old and the new libraries, but this should not have much effect on run-of-the-mill regular expressions use. Please consult the "Help" menu for more information.
The new version also makes the accurate but very slow calculation of folder sizes introduced in 8.43 optional and switches it off by default. If you need accurate folder and bundle sizes you can switch this feature on in the preferences. Calculating the size of a folder involves calculating the size of all the files and sub-folders that it contains and can thus be very slow (try Get Info... in the Finder). This speed penality can't be justified if like most people you never use the "sort by file size" feature.
The new version fixes a minor bug that could cause the preset description not to be saved correctly.
The new version fixes two minor bugs:
The new version adds support for using roman numerals in file names.
You can produce a roman numeral list (e.g. Chapter I, Chapter II, etc.) or insert roman numerals at the beginning or end of the file name.
The new version now correctly calculates the size of bundle files.
Improves unicode support for better international character set support.
This bug fix release is a recommended upgrade for all users of versions 8.39 and 8.40.
Version 8.39 introduced a regression that broke the handling of case sensitive file names.
This release makes signifcant improvements to the "rename from file list" feature.
It introduces a new simplified way of specifying current name/ new name pairs in tab delimited text files to complement the existing full path/ new name format. It also features several minor improvements in error reporting, saving file lists, updates the documentation regarding these features, etc.
This release addresses a potentially serious bug and is a recommended upgrade for all A Better Finder Rename 8 users.
This releases fixes a bug affecting fast typists only.
The new release dramatically speeds up the file comments (aka spotlight comments) protection feature introduced in the previous version.
The new release is a recommended upgrade for all A Better Finder Rename 8 users with an up-to-date Leopard or Snow Leopard installation.
It prevents file comment comment loss by explictly copying the file comments from the old file to the "new" file. This behaviour can be switchd off in the preferences but is switched on by default.
Apple's file comment (aka Spotlight comment) implementation is notoriously fragile with file comments disappearing for all kinds of reasons, including moving files to non HFS+ volumes, deleting .DS_Store files, moving files outside of the Finder (e.g. via the terminal), saving documents to new locations, archiving and un-archiving files, putting them under version control, etc, etc. For that reason, we strongly advise against using file comments to keep track of important data.
It appears that after taking several years to (recently) fix file comment loss for many standard API calls, Apple have managed to "break" file comments again with recent updates to Leopard and Snow Leopard (worked on 10.6.0). It is thus possible that you will lose file comments if you use previous versions of A Better Finder Rename.
This release fixes a cosmetic issue on Snow Leopard and enables Command-W closing of the application.
Earlier today, version 8.34 was posted with a minor display bug. If you have downloaded that version please update it.
This release contains significant improvements to the handling of unlock codes and should make unlocking the product significantly less error prone.
Fixes a rare problem with composed unicode characters affecting the "rename from file list" feature.
The new release allows A Better Finder Rename to be used as part of your ImageCapture workflow on Snow Leopard.
The new release includes a new version of the preferences pane that handles system with a legacy A Better Finder Launcher installation more gracefully.
It also fixes a minor bug where the number of renamed files was reported incorrectly under particular circumstances.
Addresses a problem when trying to rename files containing a forward slash on Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard specific changes only:
This release adds an "A Better Finder Rename 8..." menu item to the services menu and allows A Better Finder Rename to be started by selecting files in the Finder or other applications via the "Services" menu.
This also means that the new release is now Snow Leopard compatible.
This release contains a number of enhancements:
This release contains multiple bug fixes for rare multi-threading issues:
The new release also improves the regular expression matching algorithm to more elegantly deal with unicode composed character sequences (e.g. French accents, umlauts, etc).
Fixes a bug affecting 8.23.
The new release adds new ways of using MP3/AAC tags to rename rename music files:
Other changes:
This release fixes a display issue with file names that contain forward slashes.
This release delivers significant performance improvements and focuses on optimizing the renaming and file name computation.
This is the last of our performance and scalability related releases for a while and most users should notice dramatic speed improvements, especially on large renaming jobs.
The new version provides easy all-in-one error reporting and fixes compatibility with some G5-based systems.
27th May 2009
This new version delivers an order of magnitude speed improvement for the conflict resolution feature.
Further improvements:
6th May 2009
The new version features an improved renaming engine that is faster, uses less memory and can process larger rename jobs.
It also resolves a crashing issue that affected some Mac OS X configurations under version 8.17.
24th April 2009
This release fixes problems on older Macs equipped with 64-bit PowerPC G5 processors.
23rd April 2009
This release cleans up some problems with yesterday's 8.15 release.
The move to 64-bit did not go as well with "The Big Mean Folder Machine" a few months ago and some bugs crept in that this releases fixes.
22nd April 2009
This release takes A Better Finder Rename 8 to a 64-bit garbage collected architecture and prepares the ground for important scalability and performance improvements that we hope to deliver in the next two releases.
A direct link to our brand-new support forums has been added to the "Help" menu and minor updates to the optional contextual menu plugin, hot key and system preferences modules are included.
Note also that our version numbering scheme has changed. Instead of the 8.x.x numbering we now use a 8.x scheme, where the "x" is simply the release number. This gives us more room for more frequent updates now that we have the automatic update feature firmly in place. Sorry if this causes any confusion for long term users; it's new but once you get used to the idea it's a win-win.
1st April 2009
This is the latest stable release and the release you'll get by downloading directly from the website. The new 64-bit version is still plagued by a crashing bug on some systems. We hope to have solved the problem within the next few days.
This release fixes a bug affecting file name conflict resolution resolution.
27th March 2009
This release fixes a bug affecting the conversion to legal Windows NTFS/SMB and Mac OS 9 file names.
18th March 2009
The new version protects iPhoto and iTunes libraries from accidental damage.
You should never directly rename files that are under the control of management application such as iPhoto and iTunes because you risk damaging meta-data held by such applications, such as albums, play lists, etc. You should first export the files you want to rename before changing their names.
A Better Finder Rename 8 now brings up a warning dialog when you attempt to make such a modification.
18th February 2009
This release improves the usability of the "Remove specific characters" and "Replace specific characters" actions to avoid confusion with similar text-based features.
9th February 2009
This release focuses on performance and memory utilization. The conflict resolution stage is now much faster for large jobs and the performance of all stages of the renaming pipeline has been improved.
27th January 2009
This fixes a problem with the new preview list refresh feature introduced in 8.0.8. The preview is now correctly refreshed when the renaming operation is cancelled.
14th January 2009
This release makes a long requested change to the behavior of the program.
This enables you to perform multiple renames one step at a time, but in general you should still prefer using the multi-step renaming feature, because this only resolves file name conflicts once and not multiple times giving you a cleaner result if intermediary steps cause file name conflicts.
The new behavior is switched on by default, so if you prefer the old behavior you need to switch it off in the "Preferences..." dialog box.
22nd December 2008
In a recent Mac OS X update, Apple have corrected a long standing bug that affected the renaming of files containing the forward slash character. This has made the workaround used by A Better Finder Rename to remedy this bug obsolete and prevented it from renaming such files correctly itself. This new release removes the workaround and restores A Better Finder Rename's ability to rename to file names containing forward slashes.
17th December 2008
This release fixes a bug in the preference pane component.
10th December 2008
This new release adds the ability to remove blocks of numbers from existing file names.
25th November 2008
The new release adds new renaming actions to the Date & Time category:
It also contains a number of minor improvements and fixes.
3rd November 2008
The new release provides the option of switching off the automatic file name conflict resolution feature during the preview. When handling large numbers of files this can dramatically speed up the previewing speed of the application since the conflict resolution is the most time-consuming part of the preview computation.
You can switch the conflict resolution on or off in the little "gear" menu under preview table at any moment. By default it is switched off, so you'll need to switch it on explicitly to preview conflict resolution results.
Whatever the preview settings, conflict resolution is always performed before any files are renamed.
In addition, the new version also adds a few new conflict resolution schemes.
27th October 2008
The new version fixes a date sorting bug affecting only dates before the 1st of January 2000.
14th October 2008
This new version adds three new ways of adding image dimensions to the file names.
17th September 2008
Three years, 48 point releases and 7 betas after version 7 was released in 2005, A Better Finder Rename 8 is finally shipping.
This type of development effort is only made possible by the support of a dedicated team of alpha testers, who ensure that by the time the first public beta is released, the new version has already undergone extensive fault and acceptance testing.
Special Thanks to:
Extra special thanks to John Spannenburg who's managed to keep me up until late at night for the past few weeks :-)
9th September 2008
This is the first release candidate for version 8.0.
27th August 2008
19th August 2008
In this release:
11th August 2008
In this release:
Version 8 is a major upgrade and free to customers who have purchased the product after the 1st of January 2007 or who own a forever license. Other users will need to purchase an upgrade.
7th August 2008
This release fixes a crashing bug introduced in yesterday's second beta.
6th August 2008
This is the second public beta of A Better Finder Rename 8.
Version 8 is a major upgrade and free to customers who have purchased the product after the 1st of January 2007 or who own a forever license. Other users will need to purchase an upgrade.
This second beta:
You can download the new beta release from the download page, or via the automatic update feature ("Check for Update..." in the "A Better Finder Rename 8" menu).
4th August 2008
This is the first public beta of A Better Finder Rename 8.
Version 8 is a major upgrade and free to customers who have purchased the product after the 1st of January 2007 or who own a forever license. Other users will need to purchase an upgrade.
Here are some of the highlights of the new version:
The major missing feature from this first beta are save-able presets, a much requested feature that will definitely make it into the final release.
You can download the beta release from the download page.
31st July 2008
Like the last minor release this one was prompted by an alpha tester finding a bug in the forthcoming version 8 (beta 1 probably out next week!) that also affects version 7.
The new release fixes a memory leak in the "Add Image Dimensions" rename action.
16th July 2008
While development on version 8 is fast approaching the public beta stage, my alpha testers have discovered some bugs that go back to version 7..
7th July 2008
Minor bug fix release: fixes contextual menu problems.
25th June 2008
The new release adds support for UTF-16 ID3 tags in MP3 music files.
21st May 2008
This is a minor update that improves the unlock procedure.
2nd April 2008
Improved support for site licensing.
20th February 2008
Adds a new "convert to sentence case" rename action.
7th February 2008
Two minor bug fixes:
16th January 2008
It is now possible to add files to the preview using the Finder context menu while the programming is running.
2nd January 2008
This is a minor bug fix update.
19th December 2007
This version uses a more robust way of identifying and correctly ignoring invisible files during renames.
10th December 2007
This is a very minor update that simply improves consistency between the program and the on-site screencast.
In the screencast the demonstrated action is called "Produce sequence number list" whereas we renamed this to "Create sequence number list" in the 7.9.5 release. This apparently has caught out a lot of people. Sorry about that. The name is back to the original now.
28th November 2007
adds the ability to include an image's dimensions to the file name, re-organizes the action menu and fixes a minor bug.
11th November 2007
This is a recommend update for all A Better Finder Rename users on Leopard.
It sets the correct default renaming mode appropriate for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
23rd October 2007
Improves the default sorting of the preview window and delivers full Leopard compatibility.
18th October 2007
Fixes a bug affecting the "Rename from file list" feature.
26th September 2007
Updates the preview window with an iTunes-like layout, tweaks the user interface for the multi-step rename feature and contains other minor refinements.
29th August 2007
Makes further improvements to the multi-step rename feature:
8th August 2007
This is a minor bug fix release resolving a launch problem on Mac OS X 10.4.0 only.
25th July 2007
Introduces a second sorting order for all renaming actions that use ordering.
The second sorting order will be used in situations where the first sorting order assigns the same rank to two or more items. Up to now the order in which items with identical rank appeared in the sort was essentially random.
Such situations are rare in normal operation, but with the advent of sub-second continuous shooting modes on modern SLR and SLR-like digital cameras, digital photos with identical EXIF timestamps are becoming more common.
Setting the first sorting order to "By EXIF digital camera date" and the second sorting order to "By name and sequence number" will allow you to maintain the proper ordering of continuous shooting mode pictures when creating new sequence numbers from the original file names.
16th July 2007
Fixes a crashing bug introduced by a recent QuickTime update that affects only droplets.
26th June 2007
This releases introduces "silent" droplets that are capable of being used in fully automated workflows without human supervision.
More information is available in the manual.
The are also various minor bug fixes and improvements especially in the confirmation dialog.
11th June 2007
The new release fixes a bug affecting the "Add folder name to beginning" and "Add folder name to end" rename actions.
23rd May 2007
The new version adds a few additional renaming actions to make the interface more easily understandable:
The new release also updates the preferences pane component to correctly reflect the fact that all users who have purchased version 7 after the 1st of January 2007 will be given free upgrades to version 8 (including minor updates up to, but not including version 9.0)
14th May 2007
This releases fixes two problems:
23rd April 2007
This release adds the "ultra-fast, ultra-safe" renaming mode, which uses the same renaming procedure as the Finder thus optimizing both speed and safety. This is now the default renaming mode.
A minor problem with the conflict resolution dialog is also solved.
18th April 2007
The new release upgrades the mp3/mp4 tag reading code:
and introduces new mp3 renaming options:
14th March 2007
The new release
7th February 2007
The new release makes substantial improvements to the preview list:
5th February 2007
This bug fix releases resolves a problem affecting the ability to edit droplets.
10th January 2007
The new version improves support for EXIF digital picture format to include the following:
8th December 2006
This new release is a recommend update for all 7.5.5 users. It fixes a startup problem.
6th December 2006
The new version substantially improves the preview window, allowing it to be docked to the top, bottom or the right hand side and assisting with smart resizing and dragging.
The preview drawer is still available but the separate preview window now becomes the default.
The new release also adds new options for the date and time-based renaming actions.
This is the first release that requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later!
1st December 2006
Fixes a minor menu error, where the positions of "Add sequence number to beginning" was accidentally swapped with "Add sequence number to end".
8th November 2006
14th October 2006
The new version fixes the droplet editing feature that was accidentally broken in version 7.4.5.
30th September 2006
The new version updates the optional program components: the systems preferences pane, hot key and contextual menu plugin.
27th September 2006
30th August 2006
12th July 2006
Version 7.3.5 makes it easier than ever to use regular expressions to manipulate the file names through its new expression group preview.
7th June 2006
The new adds version adds an "Apply" button, which performs a rename without closing the application.
You can vote to change the standard behavior of the tool by participating in our online poll.
3rd May 2006
The new release focuses on improving performance on large rename batches of more than a few hundred files.
Other changes:
19th April 2006
The new version updates the System Preferences Pane and the Hot Key Component to address a minor installation bug.
22nd March 2006
This release fixes a problem with case changes introduced in version 7.2 and is a recommend update for 7.2 users.
22nd March 2006
The new version improves the way in which file name conflicts are handled. It already marks potential name conflicts with warning signs inside the preview and offers a conflict resolution dialog during renaming.
15th February 2006
The new version adds improved RAW photo file handling:
The new version also adds more date formats and fixes a startup bug.
18th January 2006
The new release adds the ability to remove files from the preview window and further refines the preview feature. It is also the first Universal binary release of the product, meaning that it will run at native speeds on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macintoshes.
14th December 2005
The new version corrects teething problems with the entirely rewritten 7.0 release.
In particular the tool now supports file names that contain forward slashes or composed unicode characters correctly, the hotkey component (if previously installed) is now upgraded automatically, minor UI glitches were fixed, etc.
The new version is a recommend upgrade for 7.0 users.
16th November 2005
A Better Finder Rename 7 is the result of a complete 10-month rewrite of the 70,000+ lines of code that made up the version 6.9.5 release.
Version 7 was engineered from ground-up to take advantage of Mac OS X's Cocoa application frameworks to offer a best-of-breed Macintosh user experience.
We have taken the opportunity to improve nearly all aspects of A Better Finder Rename and there are countless small and not-so-small improvements.
Amongst other features, version 7 adds the long-awaited ability to combine a number of different rename action in a single rename.
6th July 2005
The new release updates the hot key and preference pane components to provide an improved user experience:
25th May 2005
This bug fix release correcting a sorting-related problem when you rename more than 1500 files at a time.
13th May 2005
Fixes problems under Mac OS 10.3.
12th May 2005
Fixes an installer bug.
11th May 2005
This a bug fix release fixing the "Change Number" feature that allows you to pad numbers embedded in your file names (image1.gif) with additional zeros (image001.gif) or add and subtract values (image005.gif).
13th April 2005
Version 6.9 now allows you not only to convert Macintosh files names to legal Windows NTFS file names, but also into account limitations of the SMB Windows file sharing service.
23rd March 2005
The new version provides sentence and title case conversion for MP3 and AAC tags.
23rd FEBRUARY 2005
A Better Finder Rename 6.8 provides a smart truncating feature which preserves file extensions wherever possible.
26th January 2005
Allows the current date and time to be exploited for renaming files.
1st December 2004
This update provides more advanced options for renaming MP3/AAC-encoded music files.
More information in the manual.
17th November 2004
This minor update contains the new version of the System Preferences pane shared with the other A Better Finder series tools.
The System Preference Pane update:
4th NOVEMBER 2004
A Better Finder Rename now handles Apple iTunes AAC-encoded audio files as well as MP3 files.
13th OCTOBER 2004
A Better Finder Rename can now read MP3 music tags, including:
The new "Rename to MP3 information" action allows you to combine this information in a variety of ways.
The new feature uses Quicktime extensively and this means that the renaming may not be quite as fast as usual. We have provided a first level MP3 Tag cache to speed up interactive previewing.
15th SEPTEMEBR 2004
The EXIF digital photo metadata support based on QuickTime technology introduced in version 6.4.5 proved to be accurate, but also slow. Something that became particularly obvious when dealing with large numbers of files.
This new release thus focuses on EXIF performance improvements:
This has resulted in dramatically faster preview and rename performance for all EXIF or date-based actions.
18th AUGUST 2004
The new version improves compatibility with FileVault and some third-party file systems and external or remote devices.
You can now choose between a "safe" mode which preserves file comments under Mac OS X but may not work on some third-party file systems, and the "fast" mode which will work with FileVault and under other non-standard configurations.
14th JULY 2004
This is the second release that focuses on EXIF digital photo metadata. It adds supports for EXIF data in TIFF and Canon Raw (.CRW & .THM) format files; both formats are used by some professional grade digital cameras for loss-less image capture.
16th JUNE 2004
The new version can use the date and time at which a digital camera picture was taken rather than relying on the picture's file creation date.
This information is extracted from the EXIF metadata embedded in the picture files produced by most leading camera manufacturers.
19th MAY 2004
The new version allows the name of the enclosing folder to be added to the file name.
24th APRIL 2004
This point release fixes a startup bug affecting first-time users. It is a recommended upgrade for all 6.3 users.
21st APRIL 2004
The new version introduces regular expression substitution. This advanced renaming technique will be familiar to BBEdit users, UNIX veterans and most programmers. It may prove inappropriate for novice computer users.
The A Better Finder Rename implementation covers:
The new version also improves the error reporting and handling.
21st October 2015
Minor release notes version 10 has shipped.
7th September 2015
Minor release notes version 10 beta 1 is out.
29th July 2015
This release improves behaviour when an attempt to rename files on read-only media is made.
10th June 2015
This release fixes a minor bug and features a lot of behind the scenes changes.
28th April 2015
This release improves the startup behaviour.
24th March 2015
This release fixes a bug in the regular expressions implementation.
17th March 2015
This release modernizes the preview table implementation and fixes a number of minor bugs.
17th March 2015
This release was only out for a few hours and contains a major bug. Please update to version 9.48 or later to correct this.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
25th February 2015
This release refines the preferences dialog.
11th February 2015
This release adds a new tag that allows users to insert the contents of the clipboard into file names.
22nd January 2015
This release fixes the "Show Invisibles" preview option that allows you to see invisible characters, such as spaces and tabs.
3rd December 2014
This release fixes a multi-threading issue.
19th November 2014
This release fixes a sorting bug related to Yosemite's sqlite database.
5th November 2014
This release adopts a new "flatter" look to blend more easily with the refreshed Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite user interface.
The new look is only applied on Yosemite, so the application should look much the same on older Mac OS X versions.
24th September 2014
This release features a major overhaul of the music tag renaming actions.
The user interface is brought in line with the "Tag-Based Renaming" actions and now features a drag & drop based token interface.
We have also added a number of advanced AAC and MP3 tags to the tag library.
20th August 2014
This release makes a minor improvement to the "Change Existing Number" action.
28th July 2014
This release solves a rare crashing bug.
22nd July 2014
This release adds online crash reporting to help us more quickly identify stability issues in future.
18th June 2014
This release improves stability under heavy load.
We appear to have had some issues due to changes in how Xcode's LLVM compiler deals with multi-threaded memory management.
A great thank you to the people who have quickly reported these issues. Please remember that we can only fix bugs that we know about and that some bugs simply do not occur on all Mac models and configurations.
Please let us know immediately if you find a crashing bug, so we can react quickly!
17th June 2014
This release fixes an intermittent bug that has been causing trouble for many users.
It looks like this was a multi-threading bug that has been around since version 8.0, but never manifested until the latest Mavericks updates.
We are genuinely sorry for any inconvenience caused.
5th June 2014
This release ensures that A Better Finder Rename will retain its file selection when you auto-update in the future.
6th May 2014
This release fixes inaccuracies in the progress reporting.
19th March 2014
This release improves droplets on Mavericks.
27th January 2014
This release is the first to adopt the modern Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) memory management architecture and thus benefits from significant performance gains in some areas.
14th January 2014
This release introduces the new <ShootingDateSubSecond> tag.
10th December 2013
This new release makes a series of small enhancements and minor bug fixes.
20th November 2013
This new release fixes a minor bug that could make A Better Finder Rename fail without an error message.
15th October 2013
This new release finally retires our beloved multi-step action drawer and replaces it with a more modern design.
23rd September 2013
This latest version fixes a bug in the "Keep Specific Characters" action.
14th August 2013
This latest version adds the ability to display invisible/ non-printing characters in the file name preview.
16th July 2013
This release adds a shortcut for going full screen.
2nd July 2013
This release adds keyboard shortcuts for removing individual items from the preview list and for clearing the entire list.
18th June 2013
This release makes it easier to join our new opt-in mailing list.
11th June 2013
This release improves the unlocking mechanism to handle additional special cases.
6th March 2013
This release adds support for reading meta-data tags in a variety of video formats.
30th January 2013
This release adds support for the global position system (GPS) tags in photographic images.
15th January 2013
This release delivers some UI improvements.
28th November 2012
This release fixes a manual sorting bug.
18th October 2012
This releases adds the ability to limit file names to a specific set of letters.
12th September 2012
This releases fixes a number of minor improvements and fixes.
21st August 2012
This is a bug fix release.
20th August 2012
The new version improves integration with the Mac App Store version.
2nd August 2012
The new version automatically upgrades old droplets to the new Mountain Lion-compatible version.
31st July 2012
This latest update fixes a startup problem.
31st July 2012
This latest update fixes an intermittent droplet problem on Mountain Lion affecting some users.
Update: This problem was fixed with the Apple's 10.8.1 update.
3rd July 2012
The new version is ready for Mountain Lion.
26th June 2012
The new version optimizes drawing and artwork for the new MacBook Pro Retina Display.
The 9.07 update substantially reduces the download size, which ballooned up to 24Mb due to the larger artwork and is now back down to 5.7Mb.
26th June 2012
The new version optimizes drawing and artwork for the new MacBook Pro Retina Display.
20th June 2012
The new version improves the manual ordering feature by letting you drag multiple items in the preview simultaneously.
15th May 2012
The shooting date now defaults to the "Time Date Digitized" timestamp if neither "Time Date Original" nor relevant TIFF information is found.
18th April 2012
The new version enables you to automatically migrate presets from version 8.
In order to use this feature, go to the "File" menu and choose "Migrate Version 8 Presets...".
7th March 2012
This minor update fixes a problem that would make the "drag your files and folder here" graphic appear blurry in certain situations.
1st March 2012
You can now automatically migrate the droplets that you created with version 8 to the new version by selecting "Migrate Version 8 Droplet..." from the "File" menu.
29th February 2012
A Better Finder Rename 9 features a beautiful, re-designed single window user experience, the abilitity to re-order items in the preview list via drag & drop and it provides acess to over one hundred image, photo, color, camera, lens, music and date meta-data tags.
This is the first full version update of A Better Finder Rename since 2008 and we hope you will enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed developing it!
29th February 2012
This version is primarily aimed at delivery to existing users via the auto-update feature and provides information about the version 9 upgrade out today.
4th January 2012
The new version if necessary attempts to perform renames using a range of different renaming mechanisms to ensure better compatibility with third party and remote file systems.
6th December 2011
The new version fixes a bug in the id3 tag reading engine.
2nd November 2011
The new version now supports full screen mode in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
19th October 2011
The new version improves the thumbnail preview in the confirmation dialog and squashes a potential crashing bug.
Note: Version 8.90 was only released on the App Store, but contains only a partial fix for the crashing bug mentioned above. It should make this issue much less frequent but does not totally eliminate it. Version 8.91 will be submitted to the Mac App Store today, but will need to go through the approval process which can take up to two weeks.
28th September 2011
The new version adds the ability to expand camel case.
8th September 2011
This new version makes a very minor change to meet Mac App Store submission guidelines.
7th September 2011
This new version fixes a minor problem with the new music tag reading engine.
17th August 2011
This new version adds support for reading music meta information in FLAC, AIFF, M4V, OGG and APE files.
20th July 2011
This new version introduces a new "Lion mode" for renaming files more efficiently on Mac OS X 10.7.
This mode is automatically pre-selected when the program is first run on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
14th July 2011
The new version fixes a problem that would cause the new ID3 tag reading engine not to find track number and CD number information.
12th July 2011
The new version adds a new ID3 tag reading engine that can process your music files up to ten times faster than the old engine.
15th June 2011
The new version deals more gracefully with symbolic links.
10th May 2011
This release improves the way that progress information is displayed:
The new version also contains a number of minor bug fixes.
20th April 2011
This release fixes a crashing bug reported yesterday and a cosmetic problem.
6th April 2011
This is a maintance release addressing a number of minor issues.
9th March 2011
This release fixes a color space problem that made some JPEG file previews seem hazy and makes a number of minor tweaks now that new A Better Finder Rename 8 releases have abandonned Leopard-compatibility.
28th February 2011
This is the first Snow Leopard only release of A Better Finder Rename. The internals of the program have been thoroughly modernized and a lot of Mac OS X 10.5 legacy code has been removed in preparation for work starting on ensuring that A Better Finder Rename will be fully Mac OS X 10.7 Lion-compatible.
15th February 2011
This release adds an option to allow the logging of debug information to the console to be switched off. We recommend that you leave this switched on as it greatly facilitates debugging and helps us provide you with a bug-free product.
This is also probably going to be the last Mac OS 10.5 Leopard compatible release.
We usually support the current version of Mac OS X and one previous version to allow customers plenty of time to upgrade.
Apple has, however, made a number of moves in the last few weeks that make it harder than ever to maintain backwards compatibility. The Mac App Store requires that code be targeted to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Apple's XCode 4 development tools that have gone to Gold Master last week have dropped the Mac OS X 10.5 SDK and PowerPC support entirely.
We now spend a lot of time maintaining backwards compatibility and separate code bases and A Better Finder Rename is dragging a lot of legacy code, such as preferences panes, contextual menu plug-ins and PowerPC compatibility around with it.
In other words, the time has come to get ready for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and drop Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard compatibility a few months early.
Obviously, the current, I hope you'll agree, very capable 8.76 release will remain on the website indefinitely and we've made sure that the auto-update feature won't overwrite your current version with an incompatible Mac OS X 10.6-only version by mistake.
For Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users, the next few point releases will deliver a smaller, faster and modernized A Better Finder Rename.
29th January 2011
This is a minor release making it easier to purchase from the Mac App Store.
26th January 2011
This release adds the option for new users to buy A Better Finder Rename 8 from the Mac App Store.
A Better Finder Rename is now available on the Mac App Store under the name "Better Rename 8".
Apple asked us to change the product name to remove the "Finder" reference.
A Better Finder Rename 8 will continue to be available from our own web site and we will obviously honour forever upgrades and continue to offer discounted major upgrades and bundles. In other words, nothing will change for existing customers nor will new customers be treated any different.
The decision to buy on the Mac App Store or directly from us is a matter of your personal preference. We are happy either way.
Please understand that if you buy from the Mac App Store, you buy into Apple's way of running things and we us developers have very limited influence over how Apple manages the Mac App Store.
19th January 2011
This release adds two new text moving actions:
23rd December 2010
This release fixes the droplet feature which was broken amid Mac App Store changes for version 8.71. Sorry.
14th December 2010
This release delivers the first installement of new text moving actions.
10th November 2010
This release makes performance and memory management improvements.
13th October 2010
This release makes further improvements to the unicode handling.
30th September 2010
This is a minor update that:
15th September 2010
This release adds new options for inserting space saving alphabetical sequences into file names.
6th September 2010
This release fixes a bug in the 'Insert Sequence Number At Position' renaming action introduced in the last release.
25th August 2010
This release adds the abilitity to insert file path components to the front or the back of existing text or at a particular position.
11th August 2010
This release introduces a new category of renaming actions allowing you to insert path components in a variety of ways.
21st July 2010
The new release improves the compatibility of the "rename from file list" feature with tab delimited text files exported from Mircosoft Excel.
14th July 2010
The new release adds new renaming actions to the folder name category:
23rd June 2010
The new release fixes a rare crashing bug.
2nd June 2010
The new release provides three additional ways of inserting roman numerals into file names:
10th May 2010
The new release updates the help book with advice on how to best handle very large renaming jobs.
20th April 2010
The new release allows the automatic loading of EXIF information for image files to be switched off.
This can result in a huge performance boost for all renaming actions that do not require this information, especially when working with large files over a network.
Disabling the feature will, however, lead to incorrect sorting when using the EXIF information.
Our advice would be to leave the option switched on unless you are looking at very large jobs over a network.
13th April 2010
This new release adds an option to disable the Quick Look thumbnail creation for the confirmation dialog.
While it can be a great help to see a thumbnail of each picture or document that you are about to rename, if you are working with very large file sizes (e.g. digital camera raw files, medical scans, huge PDFs, etc.) or with files on a slow server, the thumbnail creation can become very slow.
As this is not such a common scenario, by default thumbnail creation remains switched off.
For those special jobs, however, where the thumbnail creation process is slowing you down, you can now disable it in the "Preferences..." dialog and you will be presented with the item's icon instead.
7th April 2010
This release adds support for random sorting in the sequence number, roman numerals and alphabetical sequence renaming actions.
23rd March 2010
This release fixes a minor bug that would allow the multi-step drawer to be closed but not re-opened under a set of infrequent conditions.
10th March 2010
The new release allows droplets to be locked so that they cannot be edited by double clicking them. This can be useful for system administrators who need to distribute droplets to end-user and want to avoid them being edited by mistake.
3rd March 2010
This release adds a new action that removes all diacritical marks (accents, umlauts, etc) from file names.
24th February 2010
This release further improves the handling of international character sets and fixes a minor bug.
2nd February 2010
This release adds a new "Replace using regular expressions" action to the "Advanced & Special" category that acts in a way familiar to most software developers and unix geeks.
The action that was formerly known under that name is still available as "Re-arrange using regular expressions" and continues to work as before. You should not have any problems with your existing droplets or presets.
Please note that regular expressions are an advanced feature, that may be completely unsuitable for casual computer users. They are very powerful, but basically also represent a particularly cryptic programming language in their own right and have a big learning curve. The documentation links to external resources for learning about regular expressions.
29th January 2010
This new release fixes a problem introduced by the additional safety checks in version 8.49 released two days ago.
The problem occured only when you were attempting to change the case of a file name (e.g. convert to uppercase, lowercase, sentence case). In this scenario version 8.49 would refuse to rename the file because a file of the same name already existed (HFS+ is case preserving but not case sensitive).
27th January 2010
This is a recommended update for all 8.x users. It fixes an extremely rare but potentially serious bug.
20th January 2010
This is a minor update that removes the current restriction of the step value in the sequence number actions having to be no greater than 255.
6th January 2010
This new version replaces the old RegExLib regular expression library with its modern RegExLibLite counterpart that uses the ICU library that is built into Leopard and Snow Leopard. This should result in faster regular expressions processing and more elegant international character set handling, as well as cutting down on the application size.
The next version of A Better Finder Rename 8 will deliver further enhancements based on this new library. There are detailed differences between the old and the new libraries, but this should not have much effect on run-of-the-mill regular expressions use. Please consult the "Help" menu for more information.
The new version also makes the accurate but very slow calculation of folder sizes introduced in 8.43 optional and switches it off by default. If you need accurate folder and bundle sizes you can switch this feature on in the preferences. Calculating the size of a folder involves calculating the size of all the files and sub-folders that it contains and can thus be very slow (try Get Info... in the Finder). This speed penality can't be justified if like most people you never use the "sort by file size" feature.
The new version fixes a minor bug that could cause the preset description not to be saved correctly.
The new version fixes two minor bugs:
The new version adds support for using roman numerals in file names.
You can produce a roman numeral list (e.g. Chapter I, Chapter II, etc.) or insert roman numerals at the beginning or end of the file name.
The new version now correctly calculates the size of bundle files.
Improves unicode support for better international character set support.
This bug fix release is a recommended upgrade for all users of versions 8.39 and 8.40.
Version 8.39 introduced a regression that broke the handling of case sensitive file names.
This release makes signifcant improvements to the "rename from file list" feature.
It introduces a new simplified way of specifying current name/ new name pairs in tab delimited text files to complement the existing full path/ new name format. It also features several minor improvements in error reporting, saving file lists, updates the documentation regarding these features, etc.
This release addresses a potentially serious bug and is a recommended upgrade for all A Better Finder Rename 8 users.
This releases fixes a bug affecting fast typists only.
The new release dramatically speeds up the file comments (aka spotlight comments) protection feature introduced in the previous version.
The new release is a recommended upgrade for all A Better Finder Rename 8 users with an up-to-date Leopard or Snow Leopard installation.
It prevents file comment comment loss by explictly copying the file comments from the old file to the "new" file. This behaviour can be switchd off in the preferences but is switched on by default.
Apple's file comment (aka Spotlight comment) implementation is notoriously fragile with file comments disappearing for all kinds of reasons, including moving files to non HFS+ volumes, deleting .DS_Store files, moving files outside of the Finder (e.g. via the terminal), saving documents to new locations, archiving and un-archiving files, putting them under version control, etc, etc. For that reason, we strongly advise against using file comments to keep track of important data.
It appears that after taking several years to (recently) fix file comment loss for many standard API calls, Apple have managed to "break" file comments again with recent updates to Leopard and Snow Leopard (worked on 10.6.0). It is thus possible that you will lose file comments if you use previous versions of A Better Finder Rename.
This release fixes a cosmetic issue on Snow Leopard and enables Command-W closing of the application.
Earlier today, version 8.34 was posted with a minor display bug. If you have downloaded that version please update it.
This release contains significant improvements to the handling of unlock codes and should make unlocking the product significantly less error prone.
Fixes a rare problem with composed unicode characters affecting the "rename from file list" feature.
The new release allows A Better Finder Rename to be used as part of your ImageCapture workflow on Snow Leopard.
The new release includes a new version of the preferences pane that handles system with a legacy A Better Finder Launcher installation more gracefully.
It also fixes a minor bug where the number of renamed files was reported incorrectly under particular circumstances.
Addresses a problem when trying to rename files containing a forward slash on Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard specific changes only:
This release adds an "A Better Finder Rename 8..." menu item to the services menu and allows A Better Finder Rename to be started by selecting files in the Finder or other applications via the "Services" menu.
This also means that the new release is now Snow Leopard compatible.
This release contains a number of enhancements:
This release contains multiple bug fixes for rare multi-threading issues:
The new release also improves the regular expression matching algorithm to more elegantly deal with unicode composed character sequences (e.g. French accents, umlauts, etc).
Fixes a bug affecting 8.23.
The new release adds new ways of using MP3/AAC tags to rename rename music files:
Other changes:
This release fixes a display issue with file names that contain forward slashes.
This release delivers significant performance improvements and focuses on optimizing the renaming and file name computation.
This is the last of our performance and scalability related releases for a while and most users should notice dramatic speed improvements, especially on large renaming jobs.
The new version provides easy all-in-one error reporting and fixes compatibility with some G5-based systems.
27th May 2009
This new version delivers an order of magnitude speed improvement for the conflict resolution feature.
Further improvements:
6th May 2009
The new version features an improved renaming engine that is faster, uses less memory and can process larger rename jobs.
It also resolves a crashing issue that affected some Mac OS X configurations under version 8.17.
24th April 2009
This release fixes problems on older Macs equipped with 64-bit PowerPC G5 processors.
23rd April 2009
This release cleans up some problems with yesterday's 8.15 release.
The move to 64-bit did not go as well with "The Big Mean Folder Machine" a few months ago and some bugs crept in that this releases fixes.
22nd April 2009
This release takes A Better Finder Rename 8 to a 64-bit garbage collected architecture and prepares the ground for important scalability and performance improvements that we hope to deliver in the next two releases.
A direct link to our brand-new support forums has been added to the "Help" menu and minor updates to the optional contextual menu plugin, hot key and system preferences modules are included.
Note also that our version numbering scheme has changed. Instead of the 8.x.x numbering we now use a 8.x scheme, where the "x" is simply the release number. This gives us more room for more frequent updates now that we have the automatic update feature firmly in place. Sorry if this causes any confusion for long term users; it's new but once you get used to the idea it's a win-win.
1st April 2009
This is the latest stable release and the release you'll get by downloading directly from the website. The new 64-bit version is still plagued by a crashing bug on some systems. We hope to have solved the problem within the next few days.
This release fixes a bug affecting file name conflict resolution resolution.
27th March 2009
This release fixes a bug affecting the conversion to legal Windows NTFS/SMB and Mac OS 9 file names.
18th March 2009
The new version protects iPhoto and iTunes libraries from accidental damage.
You should never directly rename files that are under the control of management application such as iPhoto and iTunes because you risk damaging meta-data held by such applications, such as albums, play lists, etc. You should first export the files you want to rename before changing their names.
A Better Finder Rename 8 now brings up a warning dialog when you attempt to make such a modification.
18th February 2009
This release improves the usability of the "Remove specific characters" and "Replace specific characters" actions to avoid confusion with similar text-based features.
9th February 2009
This release focuses on performance and memory utilization. The conflict resolution stage is now much faster for large jobs and the performance of all stages of the renaming pipeline has been improved.
27th January 2009
This fixes a problem with the new preview list refresh feature introduced in 8.0.8. The preview is now correctly refreshed when the renaming operation is cancelled.
14th January 2009
This release makes a long requested change to the behavior of the program.
This enables you to perform multiple renames one step at a time, but in general you should still prefer using the multi-step renaming feature, because this only resolves file name conflicts once and not multiple times giving you a cleaner result if intermediary steps cause file name conflicts.
The new behavior is switched on by default, so if you prefer the old behavior you need to switch it off in the "Preferences..." dialog box.
22nd December 2008
In a recent Mac OS X update, Apple have corrected a long standing bug that affected the renaming of files containing the forward slash character. This has made the workaround used by A Better Finder Rename to remedy this bug obsolete and prevented it from renaming such files correctly itself. This new release removes the workaround and restores A Better Finder Rename's ability to rename to file names containing forward slashes.
17th December 2008
This release fixes a bug in the preference pane component.
10th December 2008
This new release adds the ability to remove blocks of numbers from existing file names.
25th November 2008
The new release adds new renaming actions to the Date & Time category:
It also contains a number of minor improvements and fixes.
3rd November 2008
The new release provides the option of switching off the automatic file name conflict resolution feature during the preview. When handling large numbers of files this can dramatically speed up the previewing speed of the application since the conflict resolution is the most time-consuming part of the preview computation.
You can switch the conflict resolution on or off in the little "gear" menu under preview table at any moment. By default it is switched off, so you'll need to switch it on explicitly to preview conflict resolution results.
Whatever the preview settings, conflict resolution is always performed before any files are renamed.
In addition, the new version also adds a few new conflict resolution schemes.
27th October 2008
The new version fixes a date sorting bug affecting only dates before the 1st of January 2000.
14th October 2008
This new version adds three new ways of adding image dimensions to the file names.
17th September 2008
Three years, 48 point releases and 7 betas after version 7 was released in 2005, A Better Finder Rename 8 is finally shipping.
This type of development effort is only made possible by the support of a dedicated team of alpha testers, who ensure that by the time the first public beta is released, the new version has already undergone extensive fault and acceptance testing.
Special Thanks to:
Extra special thanks to John Spannenburg who's managed to keep me up until late at night for the past few weeks :-)
9th September 2008
This is the first release candidate for version 8.0.
27th August 2008
19th August 2008
In this release:
11th August 2008
In this release:
Version 8 is a major upgrade and free to customers who have purchased the product after the 1st of January 2007 or who own a forever license. Other users will need to purchase an upgrade.
7th August 2008
This release fixes a crashing bug introduced in yesterday's second beta.
6th August 2008
This is the second public beta of A Better Finder Rename 8.
Version 8 is a major upgrade and free to customers who have purchased the product after the 1st of January 2007 or who own a forever license. Other users will need to purchase an upgrade.
This second beta:
You can download the new beta release from the download page, or via the automatic update feature ("Check for Update..." in the "A Better Finder Rename 8" menu).
4th August 2008
This is the first public beta of A Better Finder Rename 8.
Version 8 is a major upgrade and free to customers who have purchased the product after the 1st of January 2007 or who own a forever license. Other users will need to purchase an upgrade.
Here are some of the highlights of the new version:
The major missing feature from this first beta are save-able presets, a much requested feature that will definitely make it into the final release.
You can download the beta release from the download page.
31st July 2008
Like the last minor release this one was prompted by an alpha tester finding a bug in the forthcoming version 8 (beta 1 probably out next week!) that also affects version 7.
The new release fixes a memory leak in the "Add Image Dimensions" rename action.
16th July 2008
While development on version 8 is fast approaching the public beta stage, my alpha testers have discovered some bugs that go back to version 7..
7th July 2008
Minor bug fix release: fixes contextual menu problems.
25th June 2008
The new release adds support for UTF-16 ID3 tags in MP3 music files.
21st May 2008
This is a minor update that improves the unlock procedure.
2nd April 2008
Improved support for site licensing.
20th February 2008
Adds a new "convert to sentence case" rename action.
7th February 2008
Two minor bug fixes:
16th January 2008
It is now possible to add files to the preview using the Finder context menu while the programming is running.
2nd January 2008
This is a minor bug fix update.
19th December 2007
This version uses a more robust way of identifying and correctly ignoring invisible files during renames.
10th December 2007
This is a very minor update that simply improves consistency between the program and the on-site screencast.
In the screencast the demonstrated action is called "Produce sequence number list" whereas we renamed this to "Create sequence number list" in the 7.9.5 release. This apparently has caught out a lot of people. Sorry about that. The name is back to the original now.
28th November 2007
adds the ability to include an image's dimensions to the file name, re-organizes the action menu and fixes a minor bug.
11th November 2007
This is a recommend update for all A Better Finder Rename users on Leopard.
It sets the correct default renaming mode appropriate for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
23rd October 2007
Improves the default sorting of the preview window and delivers full Leopard compatibility.
18th October 2007
Fixes a bug affecting the "Rename from file list" feature.
26th September 2007
Updates the preview window with an iTunes-like layout, tweaks the user interface for the multi-step rename feature and contains other minor refinements.
29th August 2007
Makes further improvements to the multi-step rename feature:
8th August 2007
This is a minor bug fix release resolving a launch problem on Mac OS X 10.4.0 only.
25th July 2007
Introduces a second sorting order for all renaming actions that use ordering.
The second sorting order will be used in situations where the first sorting order assigns the same rank to two or more items. Up to now the order in which items with identical rank appeared in the sort was essentially random.
Such situations are rare in normal operation, but with the advent of sub-second continuous shooting modes on modern SLR and SLR-like digital cameras, digital photos with identical EXIF timestamps are becoming more common.
Setting the first sorting order to "By EXIF digital camera date" and the second sorting order to "By name and sequence number" will allow you to maintain the proper ordering of continuous shooting mode pictures when creating new sequence numbers from the original file names.
16th July 2007
Fixes a crashing bug introduced by a recent QuickTime update that affects only droplets.
26th June 2007
This releases introduces "silent" droplets that are capable of being used in fully automated workflows without human supervision.
More information is available in the manual.
The are also various minor bug fixes and improvements especially in the confirmation dialog.
11th June 2007
The new release fixes a bug affecting the "Add folder name to beginning" and "Add folder name to end" rename actions.
23rd May 2007
The new version adds a few additional renaming actions to make the interface more easily understandable:
The new release also updates the preferences pane component to correctly reflect the fact that all users who have purchased version 7 after the 1st of January 2007 will be given free upgrades to version 8 (including minor updates up to, but not including version 9.0)
14th May 2007
This releases fixes two problems:
23rd April 2007
This release adds the "ultra-fast, ultra-safe" renaming mode, which uses the same renaming procedure as the Finder thus optimizing both speed and safety. This is now the default renaming mode.
A minor problem with the conflict resolution dialog is also solved.
18th April 2007
The new release upgrades the mp3/mp4 tag reading code:
and introduces new mp3 renaming options:
14th March 2007
The new release
7th February 2007
The new release makes substantial improvements to the preview list:
5th February 2007
This bug fix releases resolves a problem affecting the ability to edit droplets.
10th January 2007
The new version improves support for EXIF digital picture format to include the following:
8th December 2006
This new release is a recommend update for all 7.5.5 users. It fixes a startup problem.
6th December 2006
The new version substantially improves the preview window, allowing it to be docked to the top, bottom or the right hand side and assisting with smart resizing and dragging.
The preview drawer is still available but the separate preview window now becomes the default.
The new release also adds new options for the date and time-based renaming actions.
This is the first release that requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later!
1st December 2006
Fixes a minor menu error, where the positions of "Add sequence number to beginning" was accidentally swapped with "Add sequence number to end".
8th November 2006
14th October 2006
The new version fixes the droplet editing feature that was accidentally broken in version 7.4.5.
30th September 2006
The new version updates the optional program components: the systems preferences pane, hot key and contextual menu plugin.
27th September 2006
30th August 2006
12th July 2006
Version 7.3.5 makes it easier than ever to use regular expressions to manipulate the file names through its new expression group preview.
7th June 2006
The new adds version adds an "Apply" button, which performs a rename without closing the application.
You can vote to change the standard behavior of the tool by participating in our online poll.
3rd May 2006
The new release focuses on improving performance on large rename batches of more than a few hundred files.
Other changes:
19th April 2006
The new version updates the System Preferences Pane and the Hot Key Component to address a minor installation bug.
22nd March 2006
This release fixes a problem with case changes introduced in version 7.2 and is a recommend update for 7.2 users.
22nd March 2006
The new version improves the way in which file name conflicts are handled. It already marks potential name conflicts with warning signs inside the preview and offers a conflict resolution dialog during renaming.
15th February 2006
The new version adds improved RAW photo file handling:
The new version also adds more date formats and fixes a startup bug.
18th January 2006
The new release adds the ability to remove files from the preview window and further refines the preview feature. It is also the first Universal binary release of the product, meaning that it will run at native speeds on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macintoshes.
14th December 2005
The new version corrects teething problems with the entirely rewritten 7.0 release.
In particular the tool now supports file names that contain forward slashes or composed unicode characters correctly, the hotkey component (if previously installed) is now upgraded automatically, minor UI glitches were fixed, etc.
The new version is a recommend upgrade for 7.0 users.
16th November 2005
A Better Finder Rename 7 is the result of a complete 10-month rewrite of the 70,000+ lines of code that made up the version 6.9.5 release.
Version 7 was engineered from ground-up to take advantage of Mac OS X's Cocoa application frameworks to offer a best-of-breed Macintosh user experience.
We have taken the opportunity to improve nearly all aspects of A Better Finder Rename and there are countless small and not-so-small improvements.
Amongst other features, version 7 adds the long-awaited ability to combine a number of different rename action in a single rename.
6th July 2005
The new release updates the hot key and preference pane components to provide an improved user experience:
25th May 2005
This bug fix release correcting a sorting-related problem when you rename more than 1500 files at a time.
13th May 2005
Fixes problems under Mac OS 10.3.
12th May 2005
Fixes an installer bug.
11th May 2005
This a bug fix release fixing the "Change Number" feature that allows you to pad numbers embedded in your file names (image1.gif) with additional zeros (image001.gif) or add and subtract values (image005.gif).
13th April 2005
Version 6.9 now allows you not only to convert Macintosh files names to legal Windows NTFS file names, but also into account limitations of the SMB Windows file sharing service.
23rd March 2005
The new version provides sentence and title case conversion for MP3 and AAC tags.
23rd FEBRUARY 2005
A Better Finder Rename 6.8 provides a smart truncating feature which preserves file extensions wherever possible.
26th January 2005
Allows the current date and time to be exploited for renaming files.
1st December 2004
This update provides more advanced options for renaming MP3/AAC-encoded music files.
More information in the manual.
17th November 2004
This minor update contains the new version of the System Preferences pane shared with the other A Better Finder series tools.
The System Preference Pane update:
4th NOVEMBER 2004
A Better Finder Rename now handles Apple iTunes AAC-encoded audio files as well as MP3 files.
13th OCTOBER 2004
A Better Finder Rename can now read MP3 music tags, including:
The new "Rename to MP3 information" action allows you to combine this information in a variety of ways.
The new feature uses Quicktime extensively and this means that the renaming may not be quite as fast as usual. We have provided a first level MP3 Tag cache to speed up interactive previewing.
15th SEPTEMEBR 2004
The EXIF digital photo metadata support based on QuickTime technology introduced in version 6.4.5 proved to be accurate, but also slow. Something that became particularly obvious when dealing with large numbers of files.
This new release thus focuses on EXIF performance improvements:
This has resulted in dramatically faster preview and rename performance for all EXIF or date-based actions.
18th AUGUST 2004
The new version improves compatibility with FileVault and some third-party file systems and external or remote devices.
You can now choose between a "safe" mode which preserves file comments under Mac OS X but may not work on some third-party file systems, and the "fast" mode which will work with FileVault and under other non-standard configurations.
14th JULY 2004
This is the second release that focuses on EXIF digital photo metadata. It adds supports for EXIF data in TIFF and Canon Raw (.CRW & .THM) format files; both formats are used by some professional grade digital cameras for loss-less image capture.
16th JUNE 2004
The new version can use the date and time at which a digital camera picture was taken rather than relying on the picture's file creation date.
This information is extracted from the EXIF metadata embedded in the picture files produced by most leading camera manufacturers.
19th MAY 2004
The new version allows the name of the enclosing folder to be added to the file name.
24th APRIL 2004
This point release fixes a startup bug affecting first-time users. It is a recommended upgrade for all 6.3 users.
21st APRIL 2004
The new version introduces regular expression substitution. This advanced renaming technique will be familiar to BBEdit users, UNIX veterans and most programmers. It may prove inappropriate for novice computer users.
The A Better Finder Rename implementation covers:
The new version also improves the error reporting and handling.