Built to fix one specific trust problem

The moment this started

I needed to rename a folder full of Drive files — nothing dramatic, just a few hundred exports that needed a consistent naming pattern before I could actually use them. Every tool I found asked for the same thing before it would even open: full access to my entire Google Drive. Read, write, delete — everything, forever, just to touch the handful of files I'd selected. I closed every one of those tabs. Handing over blanket access to years of files, client work, and personal documents for a rename job felt absurd, and I couldn't find a single tool that saw it that way too.

So I built the tool I was actually looking for — one that only ever asks for the files you point it at, and is incapable, by design, of touching anything else.

What "narrow scope" actually means here

Drive File Renamer requests only the drive.file OAuth scope. In practice that means the app can only ever see or modify files and folders you explicitly select through Google's own file picker — the same dialog Gmail and Docs use. It is technically incapable of listing, reading, or touching anything you didn't pick, including files you own but never selected. That's not a policy this app chooses to follow — it's a permission boundary Google itself enforces at the API level, which is exactly why I built on top of it instead of just promising to "not look."

Getting it verified

Any app asking for a sensitive Drive scope has to go through Google's own OAuth verification review before that "unverified app" warning goes away for users — and that review is thorough for good reason; Google is checking that an app's actual behavior matches what it claims to need. Waiting on that review while real people were trying to sign in and hitting a scary warning screen was genuinely stressful. When it was finally approved and the warning disappeared for good, it was one of the better moments of building this — proof, from someone other than me, that the narrow-access promise on this site actually holds up under scrutiny.

What it does

Select files or a whole folder, build a rename pattern from find & replace, case transforms, metadata insertion, prefix/suffix, date stamping, and sequential numbering, preview every change before anything is written to Drive, then apply it — with full undo history afterward. Before shipping it, I ran it against 1,008 real files in one sitting just to be sure it held up at scale, not just on a handful of test cases — every file renamed exactly as previewed, and undo brought every single one back. See the full feature list or the step-by-step guide for the details.

Who built it

Drive File Renamer is built and maintained by Joseph, an independent developer. It's a small, focused tool — not a company, not a team — which means there's no support ticket queue between you and the person who actually wrote the code. Questions, bug reports, or feature requests go straight to a real inbox, and I read every one: [email protected].

How to verify what's claimed here

Don't just take this page's word for any of it. The drive.file scope claim is something you can check yourself on Google's own consent screen the moment you sign in — see the getting started walkthrough for exactly what to look for — and you can revoke access at any time from myaccount.google.com/permissions. Full detail on what's collected and why is in the privacy policy.