Advanced Renamer Portable

When you're faced with renaming large batches of files, you have some options. We think you could do worse than to put Advanced Renamer Portable (ARen) on the job. It's portable freeware that can add, remove, replace, append, and otherwise alter the names of large batches of files or folders. It uses several renaming methods, including options designed specifically for multimedia files like images and songs. Since that's what most people seem to have the most of on their system, we like the program's emphasis.

ARen's interface is cleanly configured with grayish-brownish tones similar to previous Office editions and a basic, efficient, Explorer-style layout. The left-side Renaming method list let us create, save, and quickly access any kind of renaming method. The gridded main list view displayed a pop-up message asking if we needed help getting started. Actually, we didn't--ARen is easy to use--but we clicked it anyway, opening a Web-based Help site that explained everything from setting image thumbnail dimensions to hot keys. We returned to the main view and clicked Add Method. ARen offers many preconfigured methods to choose from, including an extensive list of Default Tags like incrementing numbers or letters, extension, and total number of items; or we could enter or own or browse to a saved file. At the bottom of the method list, we could add batch methods via wizard-like tools.

ARen offers three batch operations--Rename, Move, and Copy--plus separate tabs for renaming files or folders. The toolbar let us add files or directories, including saved lists, and customize the columns and view. From the Settings, we could specify preferences for image and music files, and Test Batch and Auto Test buttons let us verify our selections before we ran a batch operation. The program proved very easy to use. We browsed to a variety of archives, including some containing quite a few files, but ARen handled each job quickly. We like that Advanced Renamer Portable is so easy to use, and still more that it's portable.