Flash Renamer 5.3
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Good morning everyone!
More and more these days, people are gathering; collecting and storing more files than ever before on their computer and this will only increase as technology forges forward and gives us the ability to make tedious tasks easy. Think about what you have on your own computer - not only documents, but movies, digital photos and music.
With such things as digital cameras giving us the ability to take hundreds of photographs in a day, we tend to exploit this feature by snapping away, knowing that we can delete them later if we don't want them and not lose any money. The one pain with digital photos is that they produce files with cryptic names and this program should be excellent for addressing this issue.
With the onset of the on-line movie craze (UTube; Google movies and the like,) many people have become downloading 'junkies' storing funny; incredible; and just plain loved movies and storing them locally.
Developer: RL Vision
Supported Languages: English
System Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista
Additional Requirements: None.
Tested on: Windows XP Pro.
I want you to think about something for a minute - if you have a large collection of files/movies/photographs/images, how much time do you spend with them, renaming, reorganizing and just managing them in general? I can tell you now, it's too much time! It's a task I've often dreaded in the past, because we do have a digital camera and five children.
Our two boys are grown and out of the house now, but we still have three younger children which has meant for us: numerous color guard competitions; volleyball matches; band concerts; wrestling and now just this year - football.
And I'll bet there's plenty of proud grandparents collecting photographs of their grandchildren too. :)
GUI (Graphical user interface:)
At first look, the inexperienced user might feel a little overwhelmed by the amount of information and choices immediately available to them when the program launches.
Hopefully, I'll be able to break it down a little and show you that the process of renaming many files is not as daunting as it may seem to some.
At the top left of the interface, you have a choice of what files/folders/subfolders to include and what processes you want to perform. The choices are: process name/process extension/Only rename.
Below that are your settings for various program functions, which we'll explore in more depth shortly.
To the right of the interface are three tabs: Browser/Free Select/Preset Manager; and there are also two check boxes for Thumbnails and Instant Preview.
Browser Tab:
Here you can select the files you want to rename. This doesn't seem any different in appearance to Windows explorer - so the file structure should look very familiar to the user.
Select Tab:
This tab allows you to drag and drop the files you want to rename; else you can use the green plus sign button at the top of the tab. There are also two other buttons on this tab: Clear list
(small document icon,) and delete files (red X.)
Preset Manager;
In a way, you can think of a preset as a program specific macro, that will only work in the program to which it belongs. There are four included at the moment which you can explore (very self-explanatory,) however, you can also add self created presets; delete existing ones; rename them and change the order in which they're listed.
Once you get the hang of using presets, (and honestly it's pretty easy!) you'll want to use them more and more to suit your own specific needs and to save your precious time.
Settings:
Ok, so here we get to the nitty-gritty of the software. If you don't check your settings before you begin, you'll end up with a result that you didn't expect or want.
So make sure you check each one before beginning any task. Having run through them all before writing this review, I can tell you that the parameters are broken down so well, that it's pretty much self explanatory. If you don't understand what something means after checking the help file - then I do suggest that you leave the defaults as they are.
There are a few other settings that you can change that are inaccessible by the interface, but it involves actually modifying the files. I'll warn you that unless you absolutely know what you're doing, to never touch these files at all.
Experienced Users Only: Look for the following settings which should be found wherever you installed the software. The settings are stored in the files: FlashRen.ini; Exif.ini; waveformat.txt and Codecs.txt. Remember that each time you upgrade Flash Renamer, these files will be overwritten.
Help File:
Unfortunately, the help file is on-line and not contained within the program. This means that a browser has to be launched, every time you want to refer to it. As I've mentioned before in other reviews, I often have several programs open simultaneously and don't need another to open just because I need a little help.
Having said that, the help page is comprehensive and did help me quite a bit when I had queries about certain functions.
I'd have preferred not to endlessly scroll through the page to find what I wanted though. The page needs to be laid out like a FAQ file, with the main topics at the top of the page and anchor links to reach each topic further down the page. I'd also have preferred to see the Contact; Asking for Help and Reporting Bugs; Register; Upgrading;
Version History and Acknowledgements, to be on a completely different page. It could still be linked from the help page, but those details shouldn't be where they are now. At the moment these are all at the top of the page, and I became increasingly irritated with having to scroll so far down to actually reach any help.
Features:
- The first thing I have to mention here is the speed with which Flash Renamer performs. It's incredibly fast and you could potentially name hundreds of files within seconds;
- I always love programs that allow a drag-and-drop function. This program does just that;
- Gratefully, (at least for me! ;) regular expressions and wildcards are supported;
- In order to sort files into their correct order, just add zeros to any numbers;
- I found that using thumbnail mode, I could apply just about anything to my images;
- During testing, I found no problems with applying the software to folders, subfolders and individual files;
- Something I found out in error, was the fact that you can extract meta-data from any media, such as the duration, width and height;
- Once you apply the new file names, a (real time,) preview shows them to you before you complete the action - don't forget too, that you that you can add counters to each file that is related;
- Files that are related could be kept together as photo sessions. So what does this mean? Well, wouldn't you like to keep all the photos together of a particular vacation? Or a particular event, like your children's involvement with a band/color guard or sports event? I know that I do this all the time, except I've been manually sorting them all into folders. I tested this on our son's entry into a wrestling competition and it seemed to work extremely well - as intended;
- EXIF (Exchangable Image File) data is extra information that is associated with an image in some image files. For example; your camera may record the date, time and camera settings used in the EXIF data for a picture. Image editing programs may also add or modify EXIF data associated with an image. This information is not stored in a separate file. It is part of each image file.
- Search and replace function which can replace strings within filenames;
- How often do we remain truly uniform in our formatting of file names? I can tell you that we all waver from time to time and end up with files in upper or lower case or a mixture of both. Another great feature is being able to pre-set the casing of your file names to UPPER CASE; lower case; or First Letter Case. This causes the file name field to automatically change your key strokes to your preferred style of file naming;
- It's really easy to rename your Mp3s using properties and tags.
- According to the documentation, you should be able to right-click on an image or folder and have it launch Flash Renamer, however, this didn't work for me. Using Windows XP Pro produced my same context menu with no mention of the software;
- Possibility of running out of memory on some older systems. However, this can be resolved by the selection of smaller thumbnails;
- Help file not contained within the software itself;
- It's possible that you might experience poor interface display with certain font settings. The defaults are the most common Windows settings (with no experienced issues,) and uses both small fonts and large fonts. Other settings may cause such things as buttons to look weird and possibly even unavailable in the GUI (graphic user interface.)
All programs have limitations of one kind or another. That doesn't make a product faulty. These are the limitations found in Flash Renamer:
- Files are subject to a 4 Gig limit, due to 32bit limits in the Visual Basic 6 command FileLen(). Most users won't have to worry about this, unless they intend to create one file with more than 4Gigs worth of data;
- I'm unsure whether or not Flash Renamer works with Novell networks. (If a Novell user downloads and tries this software, please send me an email, telling me of your results and I'll give you the credit in an addendum to this review;)
- The developer strongly warns against not using the software on system folders such as c:\windows" or "c:\program files;
- The software won't work if you've enabled DEP (data execution protection,) for all processes in Windows. I do use this feature and found out the hard way, not immediately understanding what happened at the time. Adding the software to my list of trusted programs changed this and the software worked well from then on;
- You may need permission to rename files. In a business environment or even if you have multiple computers in the house; some users might find that they are restricted from certain functions by the system administrator. This is a strong component of Vista also;
- You'll need to remember that the undo command, will only work completely if the file and folder structure hasn't changed between renaming the file and undoing the command
- Originality: 7/10
- Functionality: 8/10
- Intuitiveness: 7/10
With an application like this, it depends on whether or not it's worth it to you, to pay the product price. A person who only has limited usage for such software might consider it too expensive; while a person who handles images in their job; or the high incident photo-snapping individual, might find it very inexpensive and definitely worth the asking price.
Personally, because of it's performance for me today, I would consider Flash Renamer as welcome software to my image toybox. :)
Summary:
For people who have a lot of use for the functions supplied in this software, there won't be any disappointment in its behavioral output. Yes there are warnings, but as long as you keep them in mind, or keep them handy (until you know them, ) you shouldn't have any trouble. I know that my image handling times will be made easier as a result of using Flash Renamer.
Recommendation:
I do recommend this program and since a fully licensed copy is available for free today on the Giveaway of the Day web site, I also recommend popping over there to pick up your copy. For the price of FREE, it's also worth it to those who won't need to use it so often.Why not spend a little time shopping at ~ Software by Swan ~
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~ Swan
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Ahhh Agloco!
“The day will come when machines and software will tell us whom to know; what to eat; what to wear; when to go to work and what profession to pursue; when to sleep; what entertainments to enjoy and with whom to have any kind of relationship. It can’t be avoided and you will succumb.”
~ Swan (2005)
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