Using PowerRename to rename multiple files
I’ve been using multiple tools over a period of time for renaming files. It all depends on the use case, from renaming mp3 files based on the ID3 tags, photos based on their location to even movies and series based on the episode and season number.
We’ve all been there, massive amount of files, multiple tools to do the same thing. I’ve recently took a few pictures of the moon and I wanted to rename them, noting fancy with GPT yet, but have the naming convention in a sequince like moon-01.jpg, moon-02.jpg, moon-03.jpg, etc.
I’ve got the Microsoft Power Toys installed on my Windows 10 machine, and I was able to find PowerRename. It’s a great tool for renaming multiple files at once. If you want to find out more about Power Toys, you can check out their website.
The first thing to do is select the files you want to rename, then right click on the selected files and select Rename with PowerRename.
Next PowerRename will show you different options for renaming file. When I started with PowerRename, I didn’t like the fact that I had to type a search pattern in, I wanted to rename all the files at once. Luckily I found the search expression .* that selects all files. Below is a table of sum of the expressions :
| Search expression | Result match | |
|---|---|---|
| ^ | Start of the filename | |
| $ | End of the filename | |
| .* | All text in the filename | |
| ^moon | Text that begins with “moon” | |
| moon$ | Text that ends with “moon” | |
| ^full.*moon$ | Text that starts with “full” and ends with “moon” |
You can also have additional properties based on how you want to rename your files. In my below example, I only want to rename the files and not the file extention. I also want to add a prefix to the filename, so I added the {moon} property. The pattern {start=01, padding=2} means that I want to start the numbering with 01 and pad the number with 2 digits.
Before this great tool, I was using Explorer++ or Bulk Rename Utility, but for now I’m happy with PowerRename.