Three Reasons We Like the RENamer tool from Greenlink: Hint – Simple / File / Tagging
Posted on 19. Nov, 2009 by LinkedIQ in Product Reviews, Productivity
Has this ever happened to you? – You enjoy a two-week vacation with your family in Hawaii, and while you’re there you snap more than 1000 digital photos. You even managed to eek out some good ones! When you return home from your trip, eager to share your best ones with friends, you decide to create a folder of your favorite pictures. So, instinctively, you connect your digital camera to your computer and click “import”. Ten minutes later, all 1,163 photos are sitting comfortably in a file on your desktop. But, there’s a problem. All of your file names look almost completely alike. You can’t tell one file from the next. Sure, you could switch to thumbnail mode and scroll into eternity, but who really has the time?
If only you could remember that darn file name. Was it /DCMLT755, /DCMLT735, or /DCMLT375? Ugh.
Thankfully, a couple of innovative minds at GreenLink Corp. (Kenmore, Washington) asked themselves the question, “Isn’t there a better way to organize the data on my computer?” A short time later RENamer was born.
Co-founders, James McNeal and Greg McArthur, gave LinkedIQ a copy to mess around with, and here’s what we found.
Simplicity
First of all, it’s easy to use. As a version 1.0 product, it is impressively well conceived. The people at GreenLink didn’t design this product with a one-size-fits-all mentality, which is why the “customize” option is prominently displayed for easy set-up. Out of the box, it’s set up to handle your most common files including documents, photos and video. There’s an additional option, “Other”, which can be adjusted to handle unique file types.
Customization is a cinch too. Regardless of file type, the RENamer tool was easy to configure and could even be branded with our corporate identity — a cool option if you’re planning to give it to one of your clients.
It’s Filicious!
The story above — that’s happened to most of us in one version or another. Digital cameras are amazing modern devices, yet they lack (at least for now) the ability to create visual meaning when writing file names. When you begin moving meaningless file names between folders on your computers, over time you’ll tend to forget where you put things. This carries with it a whole host of problems. First, it renders the search function in your computer’s operating system useless to assist you. In this case you’ll probably spend the good part of your afternoon opening and closing image files until you find the one you’re looking for. Sorry, that’s just life without RENamer.
A critical part of renaming files involves the destination folder where they are going to reside. RENamer graciously allows you to navigate your computer’s file system on the fly. Bonus!
Tagging
In our opinion, the key to RENamer’s success is it’s innovative ability to tag any file you can imagine both quickly and logically. The user interface is designed to work visually from top down, which is a natural progression that facilitates fast navigation. When renaming multiple files, the user can toggle quickly to the next file to be named — a nice feature.
Once your files that previously looked something like /DCMLT381, have been renamed to meaningful “titles” like john_schmidt_hawaii_2009_yellow_shirt.jpg, something great happens. RENamer injects search power back into the search functions of your operating system. If you’re like us, might not use your OS search, but rather something like Google Desktop. Simply open your preferred search tool and begin typing what comes to mind. You will see it appear on the screen right before your eyes.
For more information on the RENamer tool from GreenLink, visit their website.
