Product: Lupas Rename 2000 v5.0
Developer: Ivan Anton (nickname “Lupas”)
License: Freeware
Function: Rename multiple files at one time.
This week, I needed to rename several folders of files. They were all HTML files for web sites with the extension “.html”, which means that they are static HTML files — they don’t change when they’re called.
I wanted them to be “.php” files so that I could make file maintenance easier. This way, I can have common headers, footers and other parts of the page — and have them stored one time in a single file. That way, if I want to change the footer, I change it in the footer’s file. Then, as each web page gets called, it grabs the footer file and includes it.
By the way, this week I also saw an email from someone who wanted to rename a bunch of picture files from their camera. The camera named the files something like “NAME 001.JPG”, while their slideshow program wanted the names formatted like “001 NAME.JPG”. That kind of modification looks like it would be easy with Lupas Rename.
First, by default, the changes are only applied to the files you select. There’s a checkbox (checked by default) labelled “Only rename the selected files.”
Lupas Rename will allow you to edit the file name part that is left of the 3-character extension (you know, the extension that Windows hides by default, see Hidden File Extensions in Windows) — rplacing with a given string, or replacing a search string with a given string (e.g., “html” with “php”), crop characters from the left or right side of the name, crop at a specific position, insert at the beginning or end of the name and insert at a specific position. You can even use it to change to upper case, lower case or first-letter upper case.
The options for the file name extension offer similar flexibility.
Lupas Rename will edit MP3 tags, so if you don’t have a good MP3 tag editor, it could be an easy way to set common tags such as Album, Date, Artist, etc. I haven’t tried this function, though. I use Magnus Brading’s MP3 Tag Studio for editing MP3 files.
Lupas Rename will also allow you to edit the tags in image files. I haven’t tried this function.
Another tab in the program allows you to AutoNumber the files.
I did have one PEBKAC problem ["PEBKAC" - Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair]. I replaced “html” with “.php”. Notice the “.” at the beginning of the new string. I ended up changing filename.html to filename..php, which wasn’t what I wanted. Fortunately, I found the Undo function in Lupas Rename. Unfortunately, it only will undo the last action, and I had done this in two different directories.
At the time, I fixed the first directory manually. Later, I played with it a bit and found that I could have used the “Right crop n chars”=1 to take out the extra “.” at the end of the filename. In other words, Lupas Rename recognized the last “.” as the separator between the file name and the extension, so it treated the first “.” as the last character of the file name. Cool…
and