Applying presets without opening the main application

• Watch the video introducing presets (3m 48s)

Once you have created at least one preset, you can simply drag & drop files and folders onto the icon of the closed application. Instead of the main window, a small panel appears next to the mouse pointer:

• Apply Preset: lists your presets; clicking one applies it to the dropped files straight away
• Process: chooses between Files and folders, Only files and Only folders; tick Subfolders and their contents to include the contents of dropped folders
• Show Confirmation Dialog, when ticked, shows the usual confirmation dialog before the files are renamed; untick it for fully automatic processing
• Continue (also the Return or Esc key) closes the panel without applying a preset and opens the main window with the files loaded. If you do nothing for ten seconds the panel continues by itself; touching any control restarts the countdown

You can switch the panel off with the Disable Presets popup on launch option in the General tab of the Settings window.

This is the preferred way of automating renaming tasks. You can still create “Droplets” as in previous versions of A Better Finder Rename, but with macOS’s growing emphasis on security, more and more customers have started experiencing problems with droplets. Presets-based automation side-steps these problems.