Transnomino is a free Mac app that can automate things that would take forever to do by hand, and you need to know about it if you regularly work with large folders full of files. While it requires a bit of a learning curve, it is extremely powerful and allows you to rename a folder full of disorganized photos or music files. You simply drag any folder or file collection into the app and then decide how you want to rename or organize your files. For example, you can search and replace terms, add a prefix or suffix, or number your files. You can also change the path for files and reorganize them into different folders.
How you use Transnomino to organize your files depends on what you want to do. But as an example, I used Transnomino to organize my music files by dragging an album folder with files that weren’t numbered: I select the Set option, which allowed me to completely replace the current filename, and then clicked the three click on the dot button to the right of it Set text field to add the song’s title, artist, and title to the filename, adding the spaces and dashes between them myself until they looked right.
Photo credit: Justin Pot
Instead of replacing the filenames entirely, I could have instead used the Prefix option to add the track number to the beginning of the filename. If I had multiple albums in a folder, I could use the Path option to put songs from different titles in different albums. The point is that you can spend a little time deciding what you want to name your files instead of spending a lot of time renaming them manually.
Depending on the type of files you’re working with, you can also get different metadata: if you’re working with photos, the EXIF data is available, and there’s even support for converting GPS coordinates to street addresses, meaning that you can do things like organize photos depending on where they were taken.
The specifics always depend on your needs, but the general pattern is that you can use the metadata in files to rename them. There’s also support for things like wildcards and regular expressions, allowing you to perform even more complex renaming schemes. Ultimately, Transnomino is an application you need to know if you regularly work with large folders full of files. The organization can be quickly automated, which makes working with them much easier.
