Name Mangler 2 — Easily rename files to meet your organizing needs

Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad © 2009

Many Tricks Software http://manytricks.com/namemangler// Released: 14, February 2008 Cost: Freeware/Donationware System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or later; PPC/Intel

Strengths: Ease of use, flexibility and price.   Weaknesses: None worth mentioning.   Audience: All users.   Copyright Notice: Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies.   Reviews were carried out on my iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM running Mac OS X version 10.5.7   Disclaimer: When briefly reviewing share-freeware I will often use the developer’s product, functions and features descriptions. All other comments are strictly my own and based on testing. Why need I rewrite the developer’s narratives, if they are clearly written?

 

Introduction

 

Are you one of the people who collect, and have collected, hundreds if not more related documents over the years; all stored neatly in nested folders.  You know who you are – fellow photography buffs, recipe collectors, trivia hunters, or perhaps wise saying or witticisms?

 

Have you noticed over the years the naming conventions you use have changed? No, not just because the Macintosh OS now allows more letters in a document’s title. It’s because you’ve grown wiser, and have gotten defacto more organize, I hope.

 

Have you ever tired to re-harmonize the way you name files to make searching for them more consistent?  Or has your collection grown that you need another descriptor in the title of a set of documents — more than Photo A# to Z# or perhaps more reasonably Summer snapshots to Summer of XXXX snapshots for the folders and perhaps adding tag year for all the files in that folder. [Yes, I know there is both get info and perhaps metadata related to each image but… who has the time. There’s a hard way, file-by-file — folder-by-folder.

 

There’s a perhaps clever way, if you use Automator or script, of writing a script or macro to do each individual change set, but I’m not so skilled.

 

Alternatively there’s the freeware Name Mangler 2.0 way, doing batch changes at once. A process that change be quick as a minute or less or take 10-15 minutes if you’re working with thousands of files.

 

If you’ve got a bunch of files that need renaming, Many Tricks’ Name Mangler 2.0 (a major update to developer’s previous File List program) is they way to do that. You just drag your files into its window, choose your renaming options, and click a button.

 

Publisher’s Summary

 

“If you need to rename several files at once, this is the application you have always been looking for. Name Mangler is a batch file renamer that supports the following renaming tasks: Find and Replace (including support for regular expressions); Number Sequentially; Change Case; Set Extension; Add Prefix/Suffix; Remove/Insert Characters.

 

“Moreover, you can combine all of these using the Advanced renaming mode, which even comes with some extra features, such as conditional statements, nested counters, and more.

 

“But Name Mangler is more than just one versatile renaming utility, According to it’s developer, It's an infinite number of task-specific renaming utilities: Name Mangler's Droplets make it ridiculously easy to store configurations and use those repeatedly for different, alternating purposes. Just drop your files on them.”

Using the Software

 

The range of easy-to-use renaming options includes find-and-replace, numbering, case changing, extension setting, adding prefixes and suffixes, and removing and inserting characters.

 

 

 

Just check out the menu items and pull down windows in the product’s main window, The range of easy-to-use renaming options includes find-and-replace, numbering, case-changing, extension-setting, adding prefixes and suffixes, and removing and inserting characters. You can learn even more, if you needs fall beyond the straightforward choices built into the product by checking out the built in help files.

 

You’ll discover that there's even a mode for using a special scripting language for more-advanced procedures. As a bonus, a live preview shows you how each file's name will be changed before making the change.

 

My Experiences with Recipe Files

 

As noted earlier I have many thousands of recipes, collected over the last 50 plus years. Many of my favorites, were collected as scraps of paper, index cards, recipe clippings, Co-op grocery store newsletters. Deciphered, well my mother never measured things and wrote in a central European script. They had to be hand deciphered and entered in a word processor. When I started using a computer (Macintosh SE-30) and then a few years later I acquired a flat bed scanner, I was in recipe collectors paradise, or at least purgatory.

No I haven’t converted my large recipe book collection to digital form, but there are lots of recipe eBooks out there — check them out.

 

Now over the years I adopted a number of naming conventions for my recipe documents, and even for the nested folders into which they were stored (organized). In part this was the result of changing naming limitations imposed by the operating system, and in part because as my collection grew, I made changes recipe naming conventions I used. A few simple examples illustrate the uses I’ve made to recipe names using Name Manger.

First Try — changing in my recipes folder, the word ‘with’ to ‘w’ all 148 of 26,550 items. The process took less than 9 minutes. I used EasyFind 4.0.1, my favorite document name search program to check the before and after results. Simultaneously, while renaming files, with Name Mangler running in the background, I wrote this review. There were no unforeseen changes to any names in my recipe files.

 

I also, but incorrectly changes 740 files containing the word ‘and’ to &. By not being careful of my search criteria I accidentally incorrectly changed all the recipes named Andouille {Cajun sausage) to  &ouille and also Tandoori (Indian grilled meat) to T&oori,

Altogether about 35 items were misnamed; not problem, by using Name Manger, I fixed these easily, a quick set of changes.

 

The table below summarizes my recipe collection oriented tests.

Present Name Element	Name Change Wanted	Notes/Errors
Recipe names/folders containing ‘and’	Recipe names/folders changed to ‘&’.	Andouille to &ouille Tandoori to T&oori Okay, it’s easy to fix!
Recipe names/folders containing ‘with’	Recipe names/folders changed to ‘w’.	None
>Recipe Names Labeled _FNK (Food Network Kitchens). Also, _FdNet…	Recipe Names changed to _FoodNetwork using a Droplet.	I used a variety of name_source for items from this website varied over the years. I wanted to use a single source convention
Recipe names/folders containing ‘Stir Fry or Stir-Fry’	Recipe names/folders changed to ‘Stirfry’.	None

I did however come of with a bit of in sight on how I needed to use the program.

1. If all the changes you want to make are in a nested folder, start there. It’s faster. For Example, Recipes > Indian > Tandoori. I stated with Indian because I’d not distributed all tandoori recipes to that folder. Thank you Easy Find. But I checked, Easy Find, and found that there were a few tandoori recipes found in other Cuisines such as Chine and Thai – it called fusion cooking.

2. Use a search took to see how the changed word/phase are distributed on you hard drive, in my case Recipes. Why, the fewer items the program needs to scan, the faster the results; you can always clean up outliers.

3. If you’re like me, with ample disk space, you may store some collections on CD/DVDs, it is preferable to store duplicates of inactive files in alternative folders, rather than use an alias that will not work on a PC. The software finds those and warns you about that; I chose to leave the duplicates, changing whatever is needed on both.

4. Be aware of the syntax of your changed subject. Example, ‘and” is not equivalents to ‘ and ‘. Okay play, but keep track of what doesn’t quite work perfectly to sharpen your search criteria.

Food Network Name Change
Andouille Error Correction

An Aside — According to posted blogs, Name Mangler is meant to be easier to use than those comparable Automator actions. From what users report, it seems they do indeed perceive Name Mangler as being the easier way. But beware; automation is in Doc’s future, I asked for a book to review to force me to learn how to use the application — Stay Tuned

!

Discomforts

 

A Bit of Easier To Access Help — I would have appreciated the developer adding the contents of the Help files, to a ReadMe document, and adding this to the installation package.  I consolidated the help files and now have an easier to access, in a separate window, means of exploring the products more advanced features.

 

Conclusions and Recommendation

 

What’s not to like! Easy to use, easy to learn, out of the way advanced features to use as your needs evolve, no scripting need by most users, and best of all FREE. Send these folks a donation; they do great work. Download the product. Even if you use it a few times a month, it doesn’t take much space – 447 KB; making changes to names one at a time is coolie work, for which I’m not suited.  You can’t beat 5.0 macCs, go for it now!