Master regular expressions and you can do nearly anything you can imagine with PowerRename. The PowerRename documentation offers a few example regular expressions for this tool. There’s one nice power-user feature here: “Use Regular Expressions.” These will let you perform more complex search patterns for modifying your file names. The preview makes it easy to see exactly what these options do. You can exclude files, folders, or subfolder items. The options section lets you toggle additional options to control how power rename functions, from case sensitivity to whether it operates on just the name or file extension. If you’re happy with the results, click “Rename.” If you want to avoid renaming a file, uncheck it in the Preview list. You’ll see a preview of what PowerRename will do.

At the top of the window, type what you want to search for and then what you want to replace it with. Next, head to File Explorer, right-click multiple files or folders, and select “PowerRename.” If you right-click one or more folders, PowerRename will let you operate on every file inside them as well as the names of the folders themselves. Launch the PowerToys application and activate the “PowerRename” option on the General Settings page.

To use it, download and install Microsoft’s PowerToys.

The latest free tool is PowerRename, a bulk renaming tool that will let you rename many files at once right from File Explorer. Microsoft is on a roll with Windows 10’s open-source PowerToys.

Download bulk rename utility free