Advanced Rename

The Advanced Rename dialog lets you perform complicated batch renaming operations. You can use wildcards or regular expressions, find and replace, modify capitalization, number or renumber files, rename using file metadata and even write complicated rename scripts using this dialog.

To access the Advanced Rename function, select the files you wish to rename and click the Rename button on the toolbar.

The options that affect the rename operation are:

• Type specifies the type of the rename operation - it determines how the strings entered in the Old name and New name fields are interpreted. The options available are:                                             
  • Standard Rename: enter a new name literally or rename using a simple wildcard system
  • Find And Replace: specify a text string to search for and another to replace it with (this works just like search and replace in a text editor)
  • Regular Expressions: enter a new name literally or rename using a regular expressions search and replace
• Old name specifies the old name of the file. When renaming using wildcards or Regular Expressions, this field is used to specify the "from" or "search" pattern. When using Find And Replace mode this field specifies the find string.
• New name specifies the new name of the file, or the "to" or "replace" pattern when using wildcards or regular expressions. When using Find And Replace mode this field specifies the replacement string.
• Automatically rename if new filename exists causes Opus to automatically append an incrementing number to the new filename if the new name is already in use.
• Case sensitive is used to specify case sensitive pattern matching or Find And Replace.
• Enable file information fields needs to be turned on if you want to use file metadata as part of the rename operation. For example, you can rename MP3 files using the artist / title information from the file itself. See Renaming with Metadata.
• Include file extension is only used in Find And Replace mode, to specify that the find and replace should involve the file extension as well as the name of the file.
• Rename files in selected sub-folders lets you make the rename operation operate recursively on files in selected folders rather than renaming the folders themselves.
• Rename matching filenames as one causes Opus to treat multiple files with the same base filename (excluding file extension) as if they were the one file for the purpose of renumbering, wildcard or other batch renames. For example, if you had files called 01012.JPG and 01012.WAV, they would be given the same number as part of a renumber rename instead of being numbered sequentially.
• Script mode opens the built-in Rename Script editor, which lets you write scripts in VBScript, JScript, etc. to completely control the rename process.
• Modify capitalization lets you automatically modify the capitalization of filenames.
• Sequential numbering lets you add an incrementing number to existing files (or replace the filename entirely with a number). See Numbering Files.

The Simple button can be used to switch to the Simple Rename dialog (which in turn has an Advanced button that lets you come back to this dialog). The Preview button lets you open and close a preview display that updates in real-time to let you instantly preview the outcome of the rename operation.

The Presets section of the dialog lets you store and manage rename presets: predefined rename operations that can be invoked repeatedly without having to configure the parameters of the rename each time. In the above image, Number Files is a rename preset that comes supplied with Directory Opus as an example. To load a preset, simply select it from the list and the rename options will be updated immediately with the settings from the preset.

To save a preset, click the Add button:

You will be prompted for a name for the new preset. Note that the current values that have been specified for the rename operation will be stored in the preset at this point, so you must configure the rename before saving the preset. You use the Add button to update an existing preset as well, by saving over the top of the old one.

You can also import and export rename presets using the options in the File menu - great for sharing your rename scripts with friends! See the Rename Scripting section on the Opus Resource Centre for example rename scripts you can download and use.