Adjust file data and labels with A Better Finder Attributes 5

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

For photographers, settings to adjust EXIF timestamps, or match them to file creation dates, can be useful, so photos can be sorted in the Finder by the date they were shot, rather than the date they were imported. Web designers might want to adjust file creation dates as well, so they show up on a server correctly. And anyone who uses Finder labels may want to apply labels to a group of files or folders with a single click.

A Better Finder Attributes 5 is designed to perform all of these tasks. You simply drag files or folders onto the application window, select the change you want to make from a popup menu and the settings for that change, and click a button. The application can perform its operations on all of the contents of a folder, including all of the sub-folders and files it contains. You can create droplets that you can use with specific settings, so you can reuse them easily.

A Better Finder Attributes 5 can also remove some invisible files, such as .DS_Store files, that you may not want to copy to a non-Mac server, where they can get in the way.

If you have such needs, this program is practical, but it’s fair to say that most people won’t need this type of application. This is a well-designed application for these limited tasks, simplifying operations that would be hard to perform or time-consuming.

[Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn (Twitter: @mcelhearn) writes about more than just Macs on his blog Kirkville. Kirk is the author of Take Control of Scrivener 2.]

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