By Glenn Fleishman

Get a handle on Finder file and folder names

One of the most bizarre and sometimes useful features added in macOS 27 Golden Gate is contextual naming in the Finder, as well as other places where a name for a file is useful, using Apple Intelligence.¹ I say bizarre because it’s easy to be surprised by what’s filled in—or that anything but Untitled Document or Untitled Folder appears.

Meanwhile, if you want to rename a big batch of files, you can opt for a little-known feature built right into the Finder, or dramatically increase your power with a third-party utility.

Apple Intelligence has some suggestions

There’s not much to using Golden Gate’s automatic file naming, which is the delight of a feature that’s discoverable, self-explanatory, and useful:

1. Select a file name or folder name in the Finder, wait a moment, and single-click it, so that the name becomes highlighted.
2. Wait a moment. Because Apple Intelligence is involved, some behind-the-scenes analysis of the item’s contents takes place.
3. A drop-down list of suggestions appears, which may or may not match what you want. If one does, click it. This replaces the file or folder name.

You will also see suggestions appear in Apple’s apps when you save a currently untitled document, as well as when you transfer files via AirDrop or text an image to a person or group. I’ve noticed when I text a screenshot on my iPhone, the name “Screen Image” appears in the message text without any detail.

As you can imagine, results vary. However, I’ve found in my testing that Apple Intelligence does a reasonably good job. This includes looking at what a photo or image file represents and suggesting a name derived from that—a kind of hidden Visual Intelligence.

If you don’t like this feature, go to Finder: Settings: General and uncheck “Suggest file names.”

It has a number of limitations:

• Names aren’t always suggested. This may be because Apple Intelligence has evaluated that the current name is better than one it could offer, or because the query times out or is determined to take too much computational time.
• There’s no feedback when it fails—no message appears that says “no suggestions available,” or the like.
• It doesn’t always use the current name as a context clue or, seemingly, pull from our private information to which Apple Intelligence has access. For instance, I clicked a file called “glenn as a freshman,” a photo taken long ago and far away, and the Finder suggestions were: “Person with Hand on Head” and “Person in Thought Pose.” Not inaccurate, but not specific. However, a folder I clicked offered suggestions derived from the folder name.
• Images with controversial elements may not receive suggestions. A picture of my older child from 15 years ago, dressed in a lobster costume that many people thought was a devil costume, gets no suggestions, while other photos of the same type, size, and time period do.
• You can’t get suggestions for a batch of files or folders, only one at a time.

Batch rename your files and folders

Apple introduced a built-in automatic renaming feature in Finder with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It’s limited, but functional, and if you only need some basic replacing, prefixing, or suffixing of names of a group of files, it will do the trick for free.

Long before Apple built basic renaming into Finder, I began to rely on A Better Finder Rename ($30 for all current version updates) by Frank Reiff.² It lets you apply rules to rename files or folders you select, which can include extracting information from metadata in each file to apply unique information from it.³

Each renaming pattern is created in the Actions list. So if you want to renumber files and apply EXIF metadata, you can do that as two separate Actions, as shown in the screenshot.

There are many Actions categories, each of which has context-specific choices for renaming. I’ve used A Better Finder Rename in the past to fix a folder with hundreds of images that were named arbitrarily to extract the capture date, allowing for better sorting. I’ve also used it for picayune tasks, like making sure all the screenshots for an article for Six Colors had the same prefix, to make them easier to find after uploading.

What’s in a name?

In an era in which Spotlight works as advertised, coupled with the new capabilities in Siri AI, do we even need well-named files? Oh, yes, indeed. I would argue that the more sensibly named your files are, the less time you waste trying to find what you need. Visually scanning names organized at least lightly into some kind of folder hierarchy will always provide better results than searching, even today.

This battle has raged since the introduction of the Mac—nay, since the introduction of file names! Good names save time, no matter how well-indexed the contents.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

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