NameChanger from MRR Software is a Mac OS X 10.3 and above application used to rename digital files.

We’ve found NameChanger extremely useful when grooming hard drives before processing them for digital preservation.  When files are delivered to the Media Library and Archives we find that sometimes a user will have used special characters when naming them.
Special characters include & : ; , ' / and can cause errors in the way we process the files.

For example, a slash / commonly used in writing a date means something different when a computer is processing a file named that way.

In our digital preservation processes the computer would try and find a text file named “2016.txt” located in folders “4” and then “1”.  It reads the slash as a change in the folder path.

What the NameChanger application does is lets you replace characters across all the files you drag into a session window.

See above, NameChanger actually reads the slash character as a colon.  You just have to tell the application to take all the occurrences of : and replace them with _ or another character that won’t mess up your processing.

It even lets you prepend or append things to your file names, which is also very handy if you are trying to clean up an entire hard drive of files.

NameChanger is available for free on the MRR Software website, donations are encouraged.