What's new

With the release of version 3.5 Advanced Renamer gets Unicode support. Unicode is a character set able to mix characters from different parts of the world. Until now the software has yielded unpredictable results when mixing say Chinese characters with English characters. Extraction of meta data from images and audio files will now also work proberly when they contain characters from a different codepage than what the local Windows installation is configured to use.

Support has been added for JPEG 2000 and the 3D JPEG formats MPO and JPS. 3D JPEGs are special images containing two images skewed to form a 3D picture on display devices with support for these formats. Advanced Renamer can read image size from the files and Exif information will also be extracted if present.

For those of you with programming skills this new script method based on Mozilla SpiderMonkey's implementation of JavaScript, will supply many new possibilities. This method is meant for the advanced users of an already advanced piece of software. By constructing a small script file names can be changed in much more complex ways. Also, this method will make it easier for myself to help those of you with very complex renaming problems. Remember, don't hesitate to contact me about your specific renaming task.
Documentation and examples of use will be added as soon as possible. Also the JavaScript MDN can be of great help.

Advanced Renamer has support for many file formats including music, video and image formats but now Advanced Renamer has got support for even more meta data information by integrating Phil Harveys ExifTool. When a file is selected in Advanced Renamer the ExifTool button can be used to get an overview of all the meta data information ExifTool support for this particular file. The new tag <ExifTool> can be used to extract these meta data and put them into new file names.
Even though native support is preferred, adding new file formats takes time and since this tool is already available, why not make a good use of it.

When a method in the method panel is deactivated it will be ignored by the batch process. It is an alternative to removing the method from the panel altogether.

Until now the "Add to Advanced Renamer" right click context menu has only been working when using a 32 bit version of Windows. Any 64 bit users could use Advanced Renamer but not the explorer context menu. Now both users of 32 bit nad 64 bit Windows can enable the menu from the settings windows of Advanced Renamer.

There are many ways to add files and folders to Advanced Renamer: Drag & drop from Windows explorer, Add files menu item, explorer context menu, and the Insert keyboard shortcut. Now Advanced Renamer has got another way of adding items to the list. Click the "Folder panel" menu item in the top of the window and a panel displaying folders and files is enabled.

In this version of Advanced Renamer a special command line executable has been included. This executable (arenc.exe) can execute a batch represented by a batch method file and a list of files and folders to perform the bacth on, without requiring any user interaction. This way of performing batches is meant for users with special needs and a high degree of computer experience.
The command line tool can be used as a scheduled job in a server environment or as part of another batch job.

With the new video tags you can add video information to the file name. A large variety of formats and codecs are supported, including DivX, XviD, WMV, MKV, OGM, and many more.

With the new tags you can work with these video and audio information: Width, Height, FrameRate, Duration, Codec, and Bitrate

There has been a need for more EXIF tags when renaming image files.

The new tags are: Camera make and model, Subject, Title, Aperture, Brightness, Focal length, ISO, Shutter speed, Exposure time and mode, Contrast, Saturation, Sharpness, and White balance

Many modern digital cameras and smart phone cameras can record GPS coordinates inside the pictures they take. In this version new latitude and longitude tags can be appended to the file names.
But numeric coordinates is not very informative. Three new tags can be used to add the city, country, and state to the file names. When these tags are used, the coordinates are used to lookup the names of the closest cities in an online database.

This is probably the simplest of all the methods. This new method will remove characters present in the text box from the beginning and the end of file name. Other methods can already handle this job but this methods makes it easier and faster to do.

This clever method can detect existing numbers in file name and replace them with new number sequences or adjust the existing numbers. The method can be used to adjust a sequence of unordered numbered names e.g. 003.txt, 004.txt, 006.txt can be changed to 001.txt, 002.txt, 004.txt. This task was previously an impossible one with Advanced Renamer.

Add the size of the file to the new file name. You decide if the file size should be added as bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes.

The Replace method has always been able to remove a pattern from a filename by supplying an empty text in the field "replace with", but this was not always obvious to new users. This new method is easy shorthand for using the Replace method to remove patterns from a filename.

Most methods have the Apply To select box to specify which parts of the filename the method should apply to. The List method has been missing this select box for some time, but now it available to this method too. Most often the only thing you want to change is the name and not the extension of the file, but in some cases you also want to apply the method to the extension.

Previously when the program was done performing the rename the progress dialog would stay on screen until the user chose an action in the window. It has been changed to close automatically and instead show the result of the batch in the lower right corner of the main window. If one or more errors occur during the batch, the errors will be shown prior to the dialog closing. After running a batch files that are either erroneous or successful can be re-added.

Advanced Renamer has columns for original values and columns containing the corresponding new values. In this version the columns containing the new values will become gray if there is no change to the value. It is most notable when setting up a rename batch where some files will end up with the same name as before the rename.

The new Word tag can be used to extract a word from the file name. The parameter in the tag defines which word should be extracted. <Word:3> will extract the third word of the file name. Characters considered word separators can be set up in the settings window.

Some digital cameras support a burst mode where the camera takes several pictures in one snap. When naming these images based on Exif date and time values they often end up with the same names because they are taken within the same second. Fortunately some of these cameras store an extra time value called sub second. This value can be used to sort and name the images correctly.

Before this release the name collision was set up once in the settings dialog. Since different renaming scenarios require different name collision rules, this was not the best place for it. It has been moved to the main window above the list to make it easier to set up the rules specific for the current batch.
Two new rules have also been added: Append Image Subsecond and Append Pattern. The Append Image Subsecond will add the value from the Exif Subsecond meta value while the Append Pattern will allow you to add a custom pattern to the end of a file in case two files end up with the same file name. The separator between the file name and the appended part can also be customized.

Jpeg images contains various date time values, date time original, date time digitized, and date time taken. These timestamps are usually the same, but they can differ if the image has been edited with photo editing software like Photoshop, Exif date time values can change. In the settings window of Advanced Renamer you can change which value you want to use for the image date time tags and for the image date time column.

In the past method presets were stored in the same location as other settings. This made it difficult to share the presets between computers, friends, or colleagues. Method presets are now saved in custom locations in files with a .aren extension. This allows you to find the presets faster and open Advanced Renamer with a preset preloaded.

When working with tags you can click the little button next to the edit field and work with the tags in the Insert Tag Window. This window has been updated with extra functionality for field supporting numeric values as an alternative to tags and it has been updated with information about how to use regular expression. Since regular expressions can be used more places than before a description of how to use them was needed.

If you only want to change the case of a part of the file name as opposed to the complete file name you can use this new pattern based option in the New Case method. You can supply a pattern including tags and/or regular expressions that should get changed to either lower or upper case.

The fields in Add, Remove, and Move method can now also handle search patterns with tags. The pattern it automatically translated into a numeric position in the file name. If the Use Regular Expressions checkbox is checked the search pattern will also support regular expressions. Of course you can also type a numeric value directly as always.

Choose only to rename some of the files in the list by manipulating the checkbox next to the files. By default all files will be marked for batch processing but you can choose which ones you want to rename. Use the associated functions in the right click menu to use this feature more effectively.

If you have files with dates or timestamps in the file name you want copied to the created or modified attribute of the file Advanced Renamer can now recognize the values based on a pattern. The <Year>, <Month>, <Day>, <Hour>, <Min>, and <Sec> tags can be used here to match values in the file or parent folder name.

A Windows Explorer context menu has been added to make it easier to add files and folders to the list. Right click on one or more items in Explorer and select "Add to Advanced Renamer" to add the items to the list.
Note: This feature has to be enabled in the settings dialog.

A new advanced tag called <Substr> has been introduced. The tag can be used to insert a piece of the original filename into the new file name. The tag takes two parameters, an index and a count. Example: Filename is "Hello my friend" and the tag is configured <Substr:7:2> the result will yield "my".
But it gets more interesting when using the tag for searching for phrases. The index and count can be text phrases instead of numbers. Example: Filename is still "Hello my friend" but the tag is now configured <Substr: :2>. The result is the same. But instead of copying 2 characters from index 7 we search for the first space character and copy 2 characters from that location. This is useful when using this tag on several files with a similar pattern but with name parts of various lengths.
This tag is especially useful for customizing the output folder when using Move or Copy mode.

In addition to the option of removing files with errors you can now also remove all files without ID3 tag or image information.

When dragging files from Windows Explorer into Advanced Renamer, there is no doubt how the items should be added. But when dragging folders into the list there is two ways these folders can be added, either as the files in the folders or the actual folders for folder rename. When adding the folders as files you get the choice of including subfolders and to supply a filename mask.
This dialog will also show when adding folders through the Windows Explorer context menu.

When Advanced Renamer starts it will automatically check for upgrades online and display a message if a new version is available. It will not take focus away from the current task but simply just state the fact that a new version can be downloaded.

If you want to save all the data shown in the grid to a CSV you can use this new feature. You will then be able to work with the file or folder data in another program like Microsoft Excel.