Rename files and folders with a custom Finder Plugin
By: Josh Knight
So, if you already know about this, can you just pretend that I'v shown you something new and amazingly efficient?
The Problem: I have a lot of them, one of them being just a bit obsessive about things. One of those things is naming conventions. I've decided that pretty much every file I work with should be named with all lowercase letters, and underscores for spaces. Having everything named with the same standard helps a lot in the wide world of web, and it looks better when you have a list of files. The problem is, though, that sometimes I get files from other people - with capitals and spaces and all kinds of crap. Plus, I've only recently decided on this system, so a lot of my own, older files are misnamed too.
A Solution: There's a few. One is to manually go in a change all the spaces to underscores and capitals to lowercase. I'm sad to say that I've done this before - on a lot of files. The second, and the way I've been doing it up until today is to go into Automator and create a little script - then drag the files I want to rename into it. So, it takes about 30 seconds to set up this Automator script so I never saved it. I just went in and recreated it each time.
The Solution: I'm so pleased to announce that I found a way better solution. You build that Automator script, but save it. And, more importantly save it as a Finder Plugin. Now all you have to do is select the files (or folders) that you want to rename, right click, choose Automator, then choose the name of the workflow. The one I have for download is called "Lowercase and Underscore"
One installed, it looks like this when you right click:
You can either build your own (there's a few million things you can do with Automator, so you might want to check it out) or download this one. You may have to create a directory or two, so it lives here:
I hope someone finds this helpful.
Josh
Funkasaurus Rex
Just used this and it works awesome. Nice work.
One thing: It doesn't change dashes to spaces.