Automatic PDF renaming based on title

Question

I have thousands of scientific PDFs that i need to rename, many do not have metadata. I would like to be able to create an automator action that could open a folder then open each PDF, copy the title and rename the document and save in a new folder. I have spent hours try to figure this out so I would greatly appreciate nay help. I have Apple G5 2.26Gz quad running os10.6 Thanks!

Solution

There is Mendeley, an online research tool that allows you to manage scientific publications.

It has a Mendeley Desktop tool where you can drag and drop PDFs. Mendeley will automatically parse the authors and titles from the PDFs.

Then, you can rename the file by right clicking and "Rename Document Files ...". You can also rename multiple files at once.

It's available for Windows and OS X.

Comments

[slhck]

Luckily, there is a solution, see my answer :)

[Jonas Heidelberg]

@slhck - cool, didn't know Mendeley can do that :-). So it batch processes all PDFs if you drag-and-drop them simultaneously?

[slhck]

Yep, even for thousands of files!

[Ian Turner]

I've +1'd Mendely because it works pretty well, but it can suometimes be flaky in extracting document titles.

[slhck]

@Ian Sadly, yes. There's never gonna be a perfect solution. It's weird that it doesn't auto-capitalize titles when they're all caps in the original PDF.

[raindrop]

It's so awesome! saved me so much time! Thank you so much!

[Jack Wasey]

Zotero does this better, and without the corporate association Mendeley now suffers from.

[slhck]

@JackWasey You're right. Considering that my post is from 2011, I'm surprised to see it's owned by Elsevier now, and how little it has improved over time.