pdfrename - say goodbye to ed1d47.pdf!
A simple python script to rename research PDF files based on their content.
Leverages pdfminer to extract text and GPT to generate the filename.
Before
After running pdfrename
FAQ
Why not use the Title from the PDF metadata? Because it's often missing: in my personal collection of research papers, only 44% of the PDFs have a Title metadata field.
Isn't this expensive? In my personal collection of research papers, renaming each PDF uses ~2.1K tokens on average. At gpt-4o-mini current cost of $0.15 / 1M input tokens, that means renaming each PDF costs ~$0.000315 (less than 1 tenth of a penny). I think it's worth it!
Why does it add -PR.pdf to the end of filenames? Since the cost is non-zero to rename files, pdfrename needs to keep track of files which have already been renamed to avoid renaming again. I wanted something simpler than having to store a db, using filesystem attributes, or storing additional metadata files. I settled on using this suffix (-PR for (P)DF (R)ename) as a marker for renamed files.
Usage
Set your OpenAI API key in the ENV variable:
export OPENAI_API_KEY=YOURSECRETAPIKEYThen run:
pip install -r requirements.txt python pdfrename.py filetorename.pdf
To run recursively on a directory:
find PATHTOFOLDER -name "*.pdf" -not -name "*-PR.pdf" | parallel -j 4 python pdfrename.py
To automate this, consider creating a cron job or using a tool like watchman to watch for changes and run pdfrename automatically.
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Salle, Alexandre alex@alexsalle.com. All work in this package is distributed under the MIT License.