A clever Lion tip: Smart file renaming with a drag
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 9:58AM Tweet 
I've written before about Lion and its hundreds of new features, many of which you're probably yet to discover. I'm certainly still spotting nifty updates over Snow Leopard and today I came across just such a gem.
While writing an article for one of my clients, I was working with a set of screen grabs for use in a step-by-step guide, each with a number at the end of the filename. Step 1.png, Step 2.png etc
During the editing process, I needed to duplicate a file and, rather then using the contextual menu's Duplicate option, I simply held the Alt key and dragged the file I wanted to copy which normally produces the same result, adding the word "copy" to the end of the filename. Now things are different.
Lion appears to look at the surrounding files in the enclosing folder before it duplicates the file and, where possible, continues the numbering convention. So, where I had five images labelled Step 1 through Step 5, dragging the image in this way created a file called Step 6.
Now, this wasn't actually what I wanted. I wanted the file to be different to the others in this case and, therefor, should have used the duplicate option. However, in future, quickly duplicating a file and retaining the naming convention is a handy timesaver and one I hope to remember when I need it.
1. Hold Alt and drag a file within a list of numbered files or folders.
2. The file produced will be renamed according to the numbered files and folders.
Disclaimer: Not having a Snow Leopard-based Mac available, I've not been able to check to see if this feature was available before. I'm pretty sure I would have spotted it, but do let me know if I'm wrong.
Reader Comments (4)
drag 'n' drop - good function!)) Thanks for explainin!
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I wonder if this process also with Windows. I'll give it a try. :)
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