Big Blue Ceiling

RidiculousRenamer

A batch file renamer with a preview you can edit, image thumbnails and undo.

Eddie OffermannDesign and engineering

Role
Design and engineering
Areas
Tools, Apps

There are plenty of file renamers. We built this one partly as an experiment in how well an AI chat assistant could assemble a moderately complex desktop UI. The README records the answer: the assistant never produced a working Kivy version, but did well with PySide6.

The result is a useful renamer. From the command line, pick a folder, a wildcard pattern, and any mix of prefix, suffix and sequential numbering. Before anything is renamed, a PySide6 window shows old and new names side by side, and any new name can be edited by hand. Clicking an image file shows a preview. During the run, a progress bar and pie chart track the work, with an estimated time to completion when copying.

Two choices make it safe to use on real folders. It can copy renamed files into another directory and leave the originals untouched. And every run saves a JSON mapping of old to new names next to the files, so --undo restores the last run, or any earlier one given its mapping file.

Five-step flow in RidiculousRenamer: choose a folder, pattern and naming rules on the command line; the tool writes a JSON mapping of old to new names next to the files; a PySide6 window previews and lets you edit every new name; files are renamed in place or copied to another folder with a progress bar and pie chart; and --undo restores any run from its mapping file.
The mapping is written before anything changes, so every run can be reversed.

Links

Sources

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