AutoRename

A macOS menu-bar app that renames files based on what is actually inside them.

Drop a screenshot called Screenshot 2026-05-14 at 11.42.03.png on it and get back invoice-from-northwind-march-2026.png. Drop a voice memo and get a name drawn from what was said in it. The app reads the file's contents — text, speech, subject matter — and proposes a name from that, rather than from its metadata.

How it works

Every file goes through the same three stages: extract → name → sanitize.

1. Extract

A per-type extractor pulls whatever text or subject matter the file contains. All of this runs on-device, using Apple's frameworks.

Type	Framework	What it pulls
Images	Vision	OCR via VNRecognizeTextRequest, plus subject tags from VNClassifyImageRequest
PDFs and documents	PDFKit	Text from the first pages via PDFDocument
Audio	Speech	On-device transcription
Video	AVFoundation + Vision	Audio track transcription, plus OCR and classification on frames sampled with AVAssetImageGenerator

Extractor.swift dispatches on the file's UTType, so adding a new type means adding one extractor and one case.

2. Name

NamingService sends the extracted context — text, detected subject tags, the original filename — to OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini and asks for a short descriptive name in your chosen language and length limit.

This is the only step that leaves your machine, and it only happens when you have set an API key. Extraction is entirely local.

3. Sanitize

FilenameSanitizer turns the model's answer into something safe to write to disk: strips quotes, backticks, and newlines; drops a trailing extension if the model added one; splits on separators and re-cases according to your preference; applies your naming template; truncates to the maximum length without leaving a dangling - or _. If anything goes wrong, it falls back to the original filename rather than producing a broken one.

Install

Requires macOS 13.0 or later. No Xcode needed — only the Command Line Tools.

git clone https://github.com/devank-yadav/AutoRename.git
cd AutoRename
./build.sh

build.sh compiles the Swift sources directly with swiftc, targeting arm64-apple-macos13.0 and x86_64-apple-macos13.0, then lipos them into a universal binary and assembles build/AutoRename.app. There is no .xcodeproj and no Package.swift — the build script is the whole build system.

Move the resulting app to /Applications and launch it. It runs as a menu-bar item with no Dock icon (LSUIElement).

Setup

Open Settings from the menu-bar icon and paste an OpenAI API key. Get one at platform.openai.com. The key is stored in your macOS Keychain, never in a file inside the repo.

Key resolution order is: Keychain → local key file → a bundled embedded-key.txt if you shipped one. The bundled option exists for distributing a pre-configured build to someone non-technical; it is deliberately not committed here.

Permissions

macOS will ask for two, both explained in Info.plist:

• Speech Recognition — to transcribe audio and video on-device.
• Apple Events — to read your current Finder selection so the app can rename it.

Usage

• Drop files on the drop window, or
• Select files in Finder and trigger the app from the menu bar.

Either way you get a preview window listing each file's current and proposed name. Nothing is written to disk until you confirm.

Settings

Setting	Default	Notes
Naming template	{slug}	Supports {slug} and {date}
Max length	60	Characters, truncated cleanly at word boundaries
Prepend date	off	Uses the file's creation date
Case style	—	Applied to the slug
Language	English	Passed to the model

Layout

Sources/
  AutoRenameApp.swift      NSApplication entry point
  MenuBarController.swift  Status-bar item and menu
  RenameCoordinator.swift  Owns the drop and preview windows
  FinderSelection.swift    Reads the current Finder selection
  Models.swift             FileContext and friends
  Extraction/              One extractor per file type
  Naming/                  NamingService + FilenameSanitizer
  Settings/                SettingsStore (UserDefaults + Keychain), SettingsWindow
  UI/                      DropWindow, PreviewWindow
Tests/
  main.swift               CLI harness — see ./test.sh

Tests

./test.sh

Compiles a CLI harness from the pipeline sources — excluding the AppKit shell — and runs a real extraction → name → rename pass over sample files.

Status

Version 0.1. Working, and used daily by the author. The whole project is one commit, so the git history says nothing about how it was built; the layout above is a better guide than git log.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.