ファイル名の一括変更: what the free tier covers

Searching for the cost of ファイル名の一括変更 usually means one of two things. Either the free route has just run into a wall and the question is what the wall costs to remove, or the shopping has already started and the prices on the various sites are hard to compare because none of them are structured the same way.

Both questions have short answers. The free route on macOS is more capable than its reputation suggests, and the paid tools sit in a narrow band between roughly nineteen and forty-two US dollars, with one subscription option alongside them. What separates them is not the sticker price. It is what triggers the next payment.

Where the free route actually stops

macOS ships three ways to rename in bulk, and none of them cost anything.

Finder's Rename Finder Items sheet, reached by selecting several files and Control-clicking, offers replace, add, and format modes. Format builds names from a custom string plus an index, counter or date. Between them these three cover the majority of one-off cleanups.

Automator and Shortcuts both include renaming actions, and both can be saved and re-run, which Finder cannot. A Shortcut can be placed in the Services menu and given a keyboard shortcut, which is as close to a saved preset as the free route gets.

zsh, the default shell, includes zmv. After autoload -U zmv, a pattern such as zmv -n '(*).JPG' '$1.jpg' prints every rename it would perform without doing any of them. The -n flag is the cheapest safety net available on any route, paid or not.

The wall is specific. The free route has no conditions, so there is no way to express "only files older than a year". It cannot read EXIF or ID3 data, so naming photographs by the date the shutter opened is out of reach without extra tools. It has no library of saved rules with a preview across a whole folder. And its undo is short lived: Command+Z works while that Finder session is alive and is gone after that.

If none of those four limits is in the way, the correct amount to spend is nothing.

Free applications, and what free means in each case

Two established Mac renaming applications cost nothing to download.

Transnomino is free, currently at version 10.1.0, and requires macOS 14 or later. The developer accepts optional PayPal contributions in fixed steps between one and twenty euros, and keeps legacy builds available for versions of macOS earlier than 14. It offers find and replace, regular expressions, insertions built from file attributes, sequenced actions, and a live preview.

NameChanger is also free, distributed as a zip to drag into the Applications folder, and designed for macOS 10.13 and later. It covers replace by first, last or all occurrences, wildcards, append, prepend, date, sequence, character removal, regular expressions and case changes, with the result shown in a second column as you type. It greys out the rows for files it lacks permission to change, which makes a permission problem visible before anything runs.

The real cost of a free application is not money. It is whether the developer keeps building it, and whether the macOS requirement matches the machine. A free tool that stops at an older macOS is free right up until the next system upgrade.

The published prices

Every figure below comes from the developer's own site.

Tool	Price	Licence shape	macOS requirement
Name Mangler 3.9.3	19 USD direct	Upgrade 9 USD for previous direct buyers. Includes at least one year of updates, licence valid forever	10.13 High Sierra or newer
Renamer 7	26 USD	Upgrade discount for Renamer 6 owners	15 Sequoia or later, plus Windows 10 or later
A Better Finder Rename 12	29.95 USD direct	Tiers for single user, family up to 5, small business up to 20, business up to 50, and enterprise. 30 day money back guarantee	13 Ventura or later for 12.34, with a separate 12.14 build for 10.15 through 15
Hazel 6	42 USD	Family pack 65 USD for up to 5 in one household. Upgrade from a previous version 20 USD	Folder automation rather than a renamer alone
Setapp	14.99 USD per month, Mac plan	Subscription. Mac plus iOS is 18.99, the four Mac plan is 22.99. Seven day trial	Includes Renamer among several hundred apps

Two of these are not really in the same category as the others. Hazel is a folder automation tool in which renaming is one action among many, so it is on the list because people arrive at it looking for recurring renames rather than one-off ones. Setapp is a subscription covering many applications at once, which only makes sense if several of the others are also wanted.

Name Mangler and A Better Finder Rename both offer a free trial before purchase, which means the decision can be made on the actual folder rather than on a feature list.

Perpetual is not the same as permanent

This is where the published price stops being the whole number.

A Better Finder Rename states that version 12 is a free upgrade for anyone who bought the app, or an upgrade for it, after the first of January 2023, and for owners of a Forever upgrade or of the larger bundles. Everyone else pays for the major upgrade. The app has been developed by Frank Reiff and refined continuously since 1996, and the site states that downloads, licences, updates and support are provided exclusively through publicspace.net.

Name Mangler describes its licence as valid forever and includes at least one year of updates, with a nine dollar upgrade path for previous direct customers.

Renamer publishes the sharpest illustration of what actually drives the cost. Its support page states plainly that Renamer 6 is not compatible with macOS Tahoe, and points owners to version 7. Nothing about the older version stopped working on the machine it was bought for. The macOS release cycle moved, and the software did not move with it.

The practical reading is that the renewal trigger for this category is the operating system, not the vendor's calendar. Budgeting for a paid renamer means budgeting for a paid upgrade at some point in the next few major macOS releases, whichever tool is chosen.

App Store or direct, and why the price differs

Most of these tools are sold both through the developer's site and through the App Store, and the two are not interchangeable.

A Better Finder Rename's site states that the App Store version follows Apple's rules: no discounted upgrades, and single user licences only. For someone buying one copy for one Mac, that difference is theoretical. For a studio buying five, or for anyone who expects to pay a reduced price for the next major version, it is the whole decision.

Renamer's support page notes that the two builds have the same features, and that the App Store version asks for permission to rename files because of macOS security requirements. Sandboxing is the reason. It is a one-time prompt per location, and it is worth knowing about in advance, because a dismissed prompt looks exactly like a tool that does not work.

Direct purchases are also where trials and money back guarantees live. A Better Finder Rename publishes a 30 day money back guarantee on direct purchases. The App Store has no equivalent mechanism.

Who is behind the app, and whether that changed

Worth checking before paying, because it affects who answers a support email in two years.

Renamer and its sibling Archiver were previously published under the Incredible Bee name. The incrediblebee.com site now states that both are developed by Mapache Softworks, and Renamer's own site lists Mapache Softworks GmbH in Vienna as the publisher, with support handled at that address. The applications continue, under a different developer.

A Better Finder Rename runs the other pattern: one developer, continuous since 1996, sold and supported from one site.

Neither shape is better. They fail in different directions, and knowing which one a purchase is joining is part of the price.

The costs that are not on any price page

Two of them, and both are larger than the difference between any two tools on the table above.

The first is the cost of a bad run. A rule applied to four hundred files applies the same mistake four hundred times, and the recovery is manual unless a record of the old names exists. An hour spent restoring names by hand, or rebuilding the links in a design catalogue that lost track of its assets, costs more than every application listed here put together. This is why the preview and the dry run matter more than the feature list: zmv -n is free, the trial version of a paid tool previews the whole folder, and both remove the expensive failure.

The second is lock-in through saved presets. The value of a paid renamer accumulates in the rules built inside it, and those rules do not transfer. A library of twenty presets in one application is twenty rules that have to be rebuilt by hand if the tool is later abandoned, stops supporting a new macOS, or changes hands. Rules expressed as shell commands avoid this, at the cost of being harder to write in the first place.

Neither cost argues for or against buying. They argue for deciding once, on a real folder, and then leaving the decision alone.

Working out the number for the actual job

The arithmetic is short. Count how many times this job comes back in a year, and how long a manual pass takes.

A rename that happens once does not justify any purchase, because the free route covers it and the time spent reading comparison pages already exceeds the time saved. A rename that happens weekly, on a few hundred files, with rules built from photograph or audio metadata, pays back a twenty-six dollar purchase within the first month.

The subscription comparison is similarly short. A single one-off purchase at 26 USD is passed by a 14.99 USD monthly plan in under two months, so the subscription only makes sense when several of its other applications are genuinely in use. A breakdown of how these routes divide up sits on the Pricing page, and the feature-by-feature side of the same question is in Compared with other file managers.

What to change first

Run the job once on the free route and note precisely which step failed, because that step is the only thing worth paying to remove. Then take the trial version of one paid tool on the real folder rather than a sample. Keeping the folder, the terminal and the rule in a single window is the direction Atriens takes, and the same decision can be picked up on another device through From iPhone and iPad.