Peazy File Renamer - Let's Clean Up Your File Names

Yeah, yeah, I know… not another quick weekend app, lol. I’m sorry but these are so fun!

I just need to do a few very simple things on the Mac and, although I know there’s some great scripting tools that can do this stuff in a snap, I just find it enjoyable to make the UX around a Mac App.

Now that SwiftUI works so well on MacOS, it’s a no brainer. In the past, MacOS development was quite a bit different than iOS so it was tedious to do this kind of stuff.

How is Peazy Renamer different from other apps?

As part of a side hobby of mine, I aggregate client files and they’re always named something ridiculous like John smith’s — NOTE: About_someThing.10-23.txt. When dealing with these, I always wanted to standardize these file names to something closer to: john-smiths-note-about-something-10-23.txt.

There are actually quite a few Batch File Renaming apps on the Mac App Store. I tried a bunch (even bought some!) and kept running into a few annoyances:

  • I really needed a way to deal with all non-alphanumeric chars in sequence but every app I tried needed me to enter replacement rules for each non-alpha char one by one

  • The above wouldn’t be too bad if I only had to do it once, but all of the apps I tried didn’t save your rules so you need to re-enter them every time you run the app, this is a huge pain for me since my rules for every batch of files more or less stays the same

  • I couldn’t drag and drop individual files to a list, I needed to always select whole folders then remove files that I didn’t want to rename. Also, adding more files (from other locations) to an existing file list didn’t seem to be supported in many of the apps I tried

  • The file names I was dealing with are pretty long and many of the apps showed before / after names side by side (left / right) where a lot of the file names would be cut off

  • Some of the apps I bought had, like, 20-30 different rule types that can be applied to file names. I only needed, like, 2 (replace/case) so this was quite a bit of clutter. Honestly, I dug into many of these rules and I can’t even imagine a scenario where most of these would be useful…

Peazy Renamer was born!

Drag files in and set up some file name cleanup rules

When I developed LQC, I created some useful helpers for dragging and dropping files, extracting file names and extensions, etc so getting the foundation of this app working was pretty straightforward.

Applying the rules was also pretty easy, the only hiccup I ran into was Apple has this Sandbox architecture for Mac App Store apps that prevents you from renaming files that you individually dragged into the app. Dragging the file into the app gives you access to the file, sure, but renaming a file is actually “moving” it to the same folder with a different name. Since you’re never granted access to the enclosing folder, renaming these kinds of files is impossible for a Sandbox app. Now I understand why all of the apps on the App Store require you to drag a folder… not the files.

Ultimately, I elected to just notarize the app for download from my website instead of the App Store so that I can keep the file selection feature. Also, as I said before, there are a ton of file renaming apps on the App Store so I doubt anyone would even see mine.

You can find out more about future plans and download the app from the Peazy Renamer FAQ.