Rename multiple files with Metamorphose

Posted on November 28th, 2010 webmaster 1 comment          Print

I’ve taken a lot of pictures lately and I sometimes mistakenly just copied the contents of the memory card directly to my hard drive instead of using the “Import Pictures…” option where you can specify the name of the files and they will be numbered for you automatically.

In Windows, you can select multiple files and right-click and rename the first file and the rest of the files will be named the same way with “(1)…(n)” numbers at the end to differentiate them.

Multiple files renamed in Windows

Some people, like myself, might not like this numbering, because they won’t sort by name properly in other systems.  In my case, I wanted the numbers to be “001…n” and Metamorphose lets me do just that easily.

Metamorphose is a free and open-source software for batch renaming files and folders which provides a lot of flexibility (it even lets you use regular expressions).  Here are the main features according to its website:

• Preview every item to be renamed before comiting changes.
• Add any number of operations in any order (Métamorphose v.2 only)
• Load all files in directory and in subdirectories (recursive renaming).
• Undo renaming operation in case of mistakes.
• Regular expression support throughout.
• Rename MP3 files according to their ID3 tags.
• Rename image files according to their Exif tags.
• Full unicode support means any character from any language can be used.
• Use of all allowed characters under Windows and OSX, all except ‘:’ in Linux.

Below is an example of how I used it to rename my files and use the numbering that I wanted.  The automatic preview feature is also very useful as it lets you see what the renamed files will look like as you change the different settings:

Preview the changes before you commit them

Change the numbering style

You can download this free software from here: http://file-folder-ren.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=Download

By the way, it’s written in Python .