Renaming and tagging a bunch of files

I'm hoping this is an okay place to post this? I have thousands of PDF files and I'm really trying to organise them. I have to rename many of them (as a lot are things like original_file_name.pdf and that doesn't fit the way I normally store files) and I was hoping to add tags on each file while I was doing it. I've done a bit of searching around and found that tagging PDFs isn't a native function in Windows 7 (can't quite understand why not..). I've read some program recommendations, including AF5 Rename Your Files and Bulk Rename Utility, but AF5 seems to trigger a lot of virus warnings (haven't downloaded yet, so can't confirm) and BRU seems overly complicated. Does anyone have a recommendation that could: a - allow me to 'individually' rename a bunch of files without having to right click each one individually b - allow me to 'individually' tag a bunch of files without having to select each one [particularly if it allows this for PDFs] Thanks

The problem with batch rename in this case is each file will have a very different name that reflects the content of the file, right? If so then no program is going to do this for you.

I would create a batch file to rename them. You can start the batch file from a Command Prompt:

dir *.pdf /s /b > BigRename.bat

It would have entries something like this:

C:\Users\\Documents\original_file_name.pdf

Use an editor like Notepad or Wordpad to change it to something like this.

ren C:\Users\\Documents\original_file_name.pdf New_Name.pdf

You will have to do this for every PDF file but it will be easier to set this up in an editor than it would be using Windows Explore live on each file.

On another site, a poster was looking for ways to "mass rename" about 5000 files in over 20 folders and subfolders. The problem is reaching down into all the subfolders and each attempt ended up in each file in the separate folders having names like, 'text (1).txt', text (2).txt, text (3).txt, etc.

The user discovered RenameMaster did the trick, though the UI was a bit tricky to figure out. It might worth looking into here.