‘Name Mangler’ Does Just the Opposite

This past week, I was preparing some images to upload to my Omeka archive. The images had been scanned by a special collections librarian, who had named each of the files by number. I wanted more descriptive file names. Each image was a page from a single book, and I wanted to rename the files to reflect the book’s author, title, publication year, and page numbers. With more than 100 individual page files, however, I did not want to select and rename each one.

Enter Name Mangler, a batch renaming tool for OS X (for alternative batch naming tools, including several for Windows or Linux, see alternativeTo’s entry on Name Mangler). Name Mangler allows you to perform a range of specific changes to sets of file names:

1. Find and replace. This command will find a particular set of characters in your chosen files and replace them with characters you’ve chosen. If you need to correct a typo in a series of file names, you would use this command.
2. Number sequentially. This is the command I used last week. It allows you to append numbers to the end of file names. You tell Name Mangler where to start, and how many digits to use (so the first file could be “1,” “01,” or “001,” depending on your needs). This command also allows you to append a prefix before the assigned numbers in the filename, a suffix after the numbers, or both. You can choose whether to add these new features to the original file names, or to replace the original file names entirely.
3. Change case. This command does pretty much what its title says.
4. Set extension. This command allows to change the file extensions for a batch of files.
5. Add prefix/suffix. This command is a more focused version of the numbering command described above; it allows you to add additional text to the beginning or end of a batch of file names.
6. Remove/insert characters. Similar to find and replace, this command allows you to remove a set number of characters from file names. You set where Name Mangler should begin removing characters—from the front of the file name or from the back—and from which precise character—starting with character 2, for instance. This command also allows you to insert characters to replace those it removes. This command could help you remove unhelpful numbers from a set of file names, for instance, and replace them with more descriptive text.
7. Advanced. This command allows you to perform more complex changes to batches of file names. Honestly, I’ve never needed any of the options here.

I don’t use Name Mangler all that often, but when I find myself juggling a large group of files I do appreciate the way it helps me make sense of them. To cite one more instance: I helped organize a large-scale assessment of student papers at my school last year. When we received these papers—hundreds of them—they were still named as the students named them. In other words, too many were named “Untitled.doc,” while the other names were diverse in construction and unhelpful to our enterprise. I added the hundreds of files to Name Mangler, asked it to number them sequentially to three digits and append something like “UniversityWritingAssessment_StudentPaper” to the beginning of each file. In a matter of minutes, my papers were listed “UniversityWritingAssessment_StudentPaper001,” “UniversityWritingAssessment_StudentPaper002,” and so on. These files were much easier to discuss with my fellow evaluators, and much easier to keep sorted.

Name Mangler is a very focused program: it helps you make changes to the names of sets of files. If you find yourself doing this frequently, however, it could save you significant time, and stave off the boredom of a repetetive task. If I have any quibble with Name Mangler, it’s that it does just the opposite of what its own name promises: it brings order to chaos, not the other way around.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user quinet.]