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Dec 19

Flexible Renamer – Another Free File Renamer

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on September 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

A few days ago I claimed that ReNamer was the best free file renamer available, and Mouser over at Donation Coder decided to prod their readers to see if they had come across any that were better. One member, iphigenie, mentioned a program called Flexible Renamer (a.k.a. FlexRenamer) that I decided to test out.

This free file renamer isn’t all that different from the last one, but the good news is that Flexible Renamer has a live preview feature. This makes it easier to see what you’re renaming your files to since the changes are shown, but not executed, in real-time.

When you launch Flexible Renamer it will start in a "simple" mode (pictured above) where it offers a lot of common file renaming operations right there at your fingertips, such as inserting a number at the end of the file names. Just choose your poison, and rename the files!

The only thing I don’t like about this program is that you have to perform one operation at a time, meaning to insert a hyphen followed by a number would actually require two different operations. In ReNamer you could prepare and order operations in bulk before going through with the file renaming process. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would suck having to wait a few minutes between each operation if you’re dealing with thousands of files.

Advanced Interface – Click to Enlarge

If you’re a bit more adventurous you could also switch over to the advanced mode. Here you can use wildcards, regular expressions, and translations for renaming the files. ReNamer also supported the use of regular expressions, but Flexible Renamer is a bit better mostly because of the powerful live preview. If you’re not familiar with using regular expressions then it will take awhile before you get used to them, but they are often considered to be a programmer’s best friend. To help you along the way Flexible Renamer does have some preset regular expressions:

Flexible Renamer Preset RegEx