In validation · demand check before any code or store fees

Rename Hundreds of Files by Rule and Photo Metadata — Preview First, Undo Anytime

BatchRename is a planned desktop app: native Swift on macOS first, with a separate Windows project to follow, built with a mature Windows stack chosen for the project. The concrete case: a shoot, a scan run, or a project hand-off leaves you with hundreds of files named IMG_4821.jpg, scan-final-v2.pdf, or worse — and renaming them one by one in Finder is slow, while a careless bulk rename is hard to reverse. BatchRename would rename them from rules you can read — text, sequence numbers, regular expressions, and the EXIF date or camera data already inside your photos — show you every new name before anything changes, and let you undo the whole batch in one click. It is not built yet. This page exists to answer one question first: do enough people hit this problem often enough to justify building it?

Why this shape

This is a narrow category with a long paid history: A Better Finder Rename (currently €29.95) and Name Mangler ($19) have each sold batch-renaming software for more than 20 years. That proves the category can sustain paid tools, not that this one will sell.
Finder's built-in rename handles simple find-and-replace. The gap this idea targets is metadata-driven naming (shoot date, camera, original sequence) plus a full preview and a reliable undo — the parts people improvising with scripts or Automator usually lack.
Everything would run locally on your own files. No upload, no account, no subscription.

Planned capabilities (none of this exists yet)

Rule-based batch renaming: text replace, sequence numbers, case, extensions, and regular expressions
Metadata-driven names: EXIF capture date/time, camera model, and other embedded file metadata
Live preview of every old → new name, with conflicts and collisions flagged before renaming
One-click undo for a whole batch, plus a rename history log
Saved rule presets for repeat jobs (e.g. a photographer's ingest naming scheme)

This page promises nothing that is not written above. Features, if the product is built, will follow what registrants actually ask for.

Who this is for

Photographers and designers who ingest large batches of files with unusable names
Office and admin work: scans, invoices, and archives that need consistent naming
If you rename a handful of files a month, Finder or Explorer is enough — you do not need this

Indicative price (not a live price — nothing is for sale, no payment is taken)

$24.99 one-time

Registering is just sending one email — no payment, no pre-order, no commitment to buy. Please say how you rename batches of files today, and which rule you would want most: those answers decide both whether this gets built and what ships first.

This app is not built yet. Development will only begin if 30 people join this waitlist by October 31, 2026; if that goal isn't met, the project will be dropped and every registrant notified by email. The price and threshold are test parameters for this validation, not market conclusions.

Questions

Can I use it now?
No. Nothing has been built; this page is the whole thing.

Does registering mean I have to buy it?
No. It only means "notify me if it launches". Decide when there is a real product to look at.

Why macOS first?
The longest-running paid tools in this category are Mac tools, so the demand signal is clearest there. Each platform is its own separate project — native Swift on macOS, a mature Windows stack on Windows — and registrations are split by system so a strong Windows showing can change the order.

Why not just use a script?
You can, if you are comfortable writing and debugging one — and checking its output by hand. This idea is for people who rename batches often but do not want to script each job.