This Is Microsoft’s Batch File Renamer in PowerToys 0.12

The modern version of PowerToys evolves at a pretty good pace, and the most recent release comes with a new tool that makes it so easy to perform a batch rename.

Included in PowerToys 0.12, the new utility is called PowerRename, and it comes with a super-straightforward interface that makes the whole process quite a breeze.

While I’m not using batch file renamers on a regular basis simply because I don’t need them, I do turn to such tools every now and then, and after a quick review, I honestly don’t think I need more than what’s included in PowerRename. And this means that the majority of users should be just fine with the basic feature lineup available here, albeit I do expect PowerRename itself to improve even further in the coming updates.

Because it’s a PowerToys module, PowerRename is integrated at system level, so to initiate a batch renaming you just need to right-click the files that you want to rename and click “PowerRename.”

This is one of the drawbacks actually. Because there’s no other way to launch PowerRename, you can’t use files from multiple locations on your local drives, which means that you first need to group all files that you want to rename in just one place.

Once the PowerRename UI fires up, it’s all a pretty friendly approach.

First and foremost, the app requires you to provide the text that you want to search for in the names of the selected files and the text that you want to replace it with. The best thing about this whole thing is that PowerRename comes with a live preview panel in the lower part of the screen, so you can see the new names of the files as you type in these boxes.

There aren’t too many options included in PowerRename, but the ones you get ensure a smooth basic rename process.

First and foremost, the app allows you to use regular expressions and respect case sensitive names. You can also match all occurrences and exclusive a number of items, including files, folders, and subfolder items.

The only three options left allow PowerRename to enumerate items, which means the app adds a number at the end of each file that it processes, and configure it to apply the changes either to the name or tot the extensions.

And then, the only thing that you’re required to do next is press the rename button at the bottom of the screen.

The renaming process itself doesn’t take more than just a few seconds, but the time increases as you add more files. However, PowerRename appears to be quite a snappy application, and in most of my tests, everything completed rather fast – in once instance, however, the app crashed but worked correctly after I relaunched it.

As you can see for yourselves, PowerRename does lack the more advanced capabilities that you can find in some third-party batch renaming apps out there, but for the most basic operations, it should serve its purpose just well.

What I like the most about it is the context menu integration, although as I said earlier, this is a…