Best Free Rename Utility

Best Free Rename Utility If you want industrial strength file renaming there are several great choices: First there's Lupas Rename 2000 [1]. This is a small utility for Win 98 and later that globally renames all the files in a directory and its subdirectories. It can convert names to upper/lower case, change the case of the first letter, add text, left crop, right crop and just about anything else you can think of. And unlike DOS based utilities, it will work on hidden files as well. Add in a nice GUI interface, an undo feature, full preview of changes, MP3 tag renaming, support for regular expressions and the fact that it's free and you have an outstanding product. The second and equally attractive option is Flexible Renamer [2]. It's quite similar to Lupas and choosing between them is not easy. Lupas seems to me to be easier to use for simply renaming files while Flexible Renamer has the edge with MP3 tags. Flexible Renamer can also can bulk change file attributes while Lupas can't. It also runs without installation, a definite plus. A third choice is Bulk Rename [3]. It's a bit like Lupas Rename and Flexible Renamer rolled into one product. That means more power but at the cost of greater complexity and a steeper learning curve. Indeed the option-laden opening screen would scare the pants off average users. However it is the bulk re-namer product I like most and many power users would I suspect, agree. However if you only need a re-namer for re-labeling digital photos and MP3 files you might like instead to looked at a program [4] called "THE Rename" (sic). that's better suited to these tasks. It's freeware and works on all versions of Windows though usage is not very intuitive.
Code:
[1] http://www.azheavymetal.com/~lupasrename/lupasrename.php Freeware, all Windows versions, 734KB [2] http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA014830/english/FlexRena/ Freeware, all Windows versions, 648KB [3] http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php Freeware, Windows 98SE and later, 622KB [4] http://www.herve-thouzard.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=1 Freeware, all Win versions, 2.9MB