15-Minute Reviews :: Flash Renamer v5.3
Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s title is Flash Renamer version 5.3 by RL Vision – An application to aid you in renaming a series of files quickly and easily.
Software Description
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“Flash Renamer is a time saver for people with large amounts of files, eg digital camera owners, webmasters & media collectors (music/images/movies). It renames many files at once, so called batch or bulk renaming. With Flash Renamer you can automate thousands of file renames in a single click!
Rename filters include set casing, MP3 renaming, find/replace, set attributes, add & crop strings, sequential numbering and an advanced format function.”
Quick Pros
- Interface is fairly cluttered, but still stays very usable
- Tons of features
- Regular expression support can be powerful
- EXIF information inserting
- Thumbnails feature useful for renaming images coming off of a digital camera
- Visual Assist and drop-down of inserts very helpful
- Speed of application is very quick
Quick Cons
- Can’t do multiple steps at same time in some cases
- Added a folder to Free Select, tried to remove it and hung application sometimes
- A little awkward to browse to a folder
- Wish Add and Remove could be used at the same time
Expansion
I handle a lot of images on a daily basis. While I usually use Windows built-in renaming functionality while transferring photos, I’ve been interested in trying an application such as this one to aid in having a bit more power over my sorting.
When you launch the application, you’re greeted by a window showing you the 4-step process of renaming. With this application, I feel that this is just not quite enough information, concidering the sheer number of features and the layout. The interface is very snugly packed; There are a total of 11 tabs of different renaming options and three tabs along the top of the second window – 2 for file selections (One via file exploring, the other a drag and drop window), and 1 for quick access to presets. There is a lot of functionality spread between the 11 tabs; So much, that the application essentially only allows you to run a single tab’s renaming/resetting functionality at a time unless you build presets. While I listed this as a con, it is sort of a pro at the same time – There is no risk of messing up your filenames because you forgot to change one setting on one tab that changed everything. In many cases, some of the functionality from other tabs can be used on a limited basis in others because of the inserts that can be used; For example, you can still number your files from the Replace tab, simply by insering
There are a ton of features here; I’m just going to touch on a few just due to the sheer volume of features. First off, there is support for regular expression replacement functionality, giving some serious punch to your renaming duties. There is also the ability to change the casing of both the filenames and the file extension; Handy for those collections of MP3s you’ve made from your CDs and CDDB produced crazy ID3 and filenames. Add and remove is a handy function if you simply want to add to or remove parts of the filename instead of using the replace functionality. Numbering is very powerful; By default, it pads the numbers automatically to the length needed to be able to play nicely with Windows Explorer (And other applications’) sorting functionality. MP3 tags is very handy in the fact that you can change the filenames based on the ID3 tags that are already attached to a file; Very handy, concidering you can preview the resulting filenames to see if the ID3 tags are messed up as well. Finally, presets are a method in which you can build a ‘script’ so to speak to do multiple steps; There are some included presets to demonstrate the power and the MP3 one is well designed to help you organize your collection much better. There is a lot more as well.
There are a lot of helpful extras as well in this application. The thumbnails checkbox allows you to see thumbnails of the images you may have up in the browser or file select. This can be useful for helping you sort your images as well after coming off of your digital camera, and ensuring you have the correct files. Visual Assist can be found around the application as well, and can help you count the length of words, or select a good replace phrase or so forth. Finally, as mentioned above, the drop-down box for building replacement tags with insert text blocks is helpful so you’re not memorizing dozens of tags.
During my little bit of testing, I found that the speed of this application is fairly quick and would not take long to get through larger collections of images (1000+) would not take long at all. I did however experience a crashbug, and it won’t replicate each time, but happens commonly. The process that crashes the application seems to be when I add a folder to the Free Select window and then immediately select it and remove it from the list, the application does not remove the item, and while the tabs are all still clickable, none of the contents change, nor does any of the controls that are left inside. When I click the close button on the window, the application immediately reports a Windows crash window then. Not a huge deal since it does take a certain order of events and is not a common aspect, I would think, it is still a bug present.
I did have a few other concerns with this application. I did find that starting to browse for a folder was awkward at best until I learned the F12 hotkey. The button is the third folder icon right below the tabs that contain Browser/Free Select/Preset Manager which provides you the common Windows folder select dialog box. It would have been nice if it was a little simpler than either that or navigating the rest of the folders using the built-in browser would have been easier. Another part that did irritate me was the fact that I couldn’t add and replace at the same time; Something so simple in idea but did not work as intended.
Final Verdict
While the interface is cluttered badly, I found that this application was actually easy to get around; A lot of thought has gone into this application to ensure things run smoothly as they can. There is a lot of features to make this a lucrative title and does offer some speed on its side. For free, this is a great little application for those who may need to rename a lot of files and would rather have a bit of help. As for paying $19.95, while normally I’d find it hard to recommend a title as this one when there is so many freeware alternatives out there ( See SnapFile’s list to see just some ) – I would want to do a bit more research into the freeware titles first, but for $19.95 and what you get with this application, this isn’t a bad deal, especially if you handle a lot of files requiring bulk renaming.
Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, September 20, 2007
