I have a “To File” folder with about 700 PDFs that I need to rename and organize, mostly OCR-ed scans from my Doxie scanner. I don’t really want to set up Hazel for this, although I could.
Any ideas of good apps for renaming and triaging files?
Have you had a look at Name Mangler from the wonderful Developer, Many Tricks.
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Good but A Better Finder Rename 12 is better (pun intended Lol)
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I have been using A Better Finder Rename, too. It also is very powerful. 
https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/index.html?lang=en
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I use NameChanger a lot to rename files and then I can easily group them and move them into new folders as required.
I don’t know how advanced you want to get, but there’s a rename function built in, in Finder. Mark the files folder and hit the File menu > Change name (or something similar, I have a Swedish system).
With that you can rename files with numbers, date etc etc. Quite useful bot not on steriods.
FWIW,
/andreas
Yes, if you have multiple files selected, “Rename” in the File menu becomes “Rename…” and you get several options of various powers. But if the Finder Search is used first to narrow down the selected files this technique becomes even more powerful as you can rename based on multiple criteria.
That said, I usually do this using Hazel. I like to do this on the fly, with each new PDF, rather than batch processing a whole folder of PDFs.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
Totally overkill but DevonThink 4 with a local (or web API) GPT will let you create an action that will let GPT review contents of each file and rename the documents (and even add metadata).
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I want the script that magically goes through everything I’ve hoarded and throws away the stuff I will never look at or ever need to look at again. Then it can get down to renaming and tagging what’s left. 
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This thread is a year old but it still comes up in search, so for whoever lands here next.
Something worth separating: everything recommended above (Name Mangler, A Better Finder Rename, NameChanger, Finder’s own Rename) renames by pattern. They’re excellent when your files share a structure, IMG_0041, IMG_0042, same shoot, same prefix. But 700 scans don’t share a structure. Each one says something different inside, and no pattern can know that page 1 is a phone bill and page 2 is a lease.
One thing that costs nothing and helps before you buy anything: if the scans are already OCR-ed, as the original poster’s were, they have a text layer, which means Spotlight can see inside them. A Smart Folder with “Contents contain” beats scrolling. That won’t rename anything, but it does the triaging half, and it’s built in.
For the renaming half you need something that reads each file and decides per file. MacinTosher’s DEVONthink 4 route does exactly that and is the most capable answer here, at DEVONthink prices. Hazel 6 can do it too, since it OCRs on the fly for rule matching and you can use the captured text in the rename, but you write a pattern per document type, which is the part the original poster said he wanted to avoid.
I write a small menu bar app called Tidy (tidymacapp.com) that does that one step and nothing else: it reads each image or scanned PDF with the OCR built into macOS and proposes a name from what it found, one file at a time, nothing uploaded. $9 once. I’m the developer, so weigh that accordingly. I’m mentioning it because “rename by content, not by pattern” is the distinction this thread is missing, whichever tool you end up using.
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