A Downloads folder tells the same story on every Mac: document (3).pdf, Scan_0042.pdf, IMG_2041.jpg, invoice.pdf, invoice (1).pdf. Every one of them says what it is on the inside. None of them says it on the outside.
There are four ways to fix that on a Mac. They solve different problems, so it is worth knowing which one you actually have.
Select a group of files, right-click and choose Rename. You can replace text, add text, or give them all a name with a counter or a date. It is built in, it is instant and it is perfect for "Holiday 1, Holiday 2, Holiday 3".
It never looks inside the file. If the name you want is in the document, Finder cannot help.
Apps like A Better Finder Rename take the Finder idea much further: patterns, regular expressions, numbering, many rules chained together. If you rename hundreds of camera files or exports from a system that always uses the same format, this is the right tool and it is very good at it.
It still works from the name and the file's properties, not from what the document says.
Hazel watches folders and applies rules you write. Since version 6 it can run text recognition on a file that has no text layer, so a rule can say "if this PDF contains Acme Insurance, rename it and file it".
It is precise and predictable. The cost is that you write a pattern per kind of document, and patterns break when the bank redesigns its statement. If you have five kinds of paperwork that never change, it is excellent.
The newest approach skips the patterns: read the document, work out what it is, and name it from that. Most apps in this group hand the text, or the whole file, to a language model. NameQuick uses its own cloud or your API key. RenameClick ships a local model and offers cloud providers as an option.
The question to ask any of them is the same: where is the file read, and can the name contain words that are not in the file? A model is good at understanding a document and less good at mechanics. It can return a date that is not on the page, or a name with a character the filesystem refuses.
Tidy is in the fourth group, and it is what I build, so read this part as informed rather than neutral.
Everything is read on the Mac with Apple's text recognition: PDFs, scanned PDFs, photos, screenshots, and Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages and Numbers files. Then Tidy looks for what a person would use as the name. For a bill or a statement, the type and who issued it. For a document, the largest title on the first page rather than the letterhead. For a screenshot, what kind it is and its headline. On Macs with Apple Intelligence, it can ask Apple's model when nothing else is clear, on the Mac, and throws the name away if it contains a word that is not in the document.
| What it was | What Tidy named it |
|---|---|
| A US bank statement | statement-bonvenu-bank.pdf |
| A German builder's invoice | rechnung-muller-bau-gmbh.pdf |
| A screenshot of a GOV.UK page | how-council-tax-works.png |
Every rename says why it chose that name ("Because: the paper's type and issuer"), and one click undoes it. Files it cannot read, like archives, keep their name. Names you gave a file yourself are left alone.
The app I built is Tidy for Mac. It names your files by what is inside them, files them away with rules, and lets you search inside scans and screenshots with ⌥Space. Everything is read on your Mac and nothing is uploaded. It never deletes anything: what it removes goes to the Trash. US$9 once, macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon and Intel. I am a solo developer in Santiago, Chile, and I answer every email myself.
Also worth reading: Rename screenshots automatically · Rename scanned PDFs by what is inside · Tidy and NameQuick, side by side · Tidy and Hazel, side by side
This article in: English · Español · Deutsch · Français · Português