Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s 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 for a list of past Mac Gems. There are times when you may want to change certain Finder attributes on specific files, like the creation or modification dates. You may want to apply Finder labels to a number of files in folders and sub-folders without performing the operation for each group of files manually.

Or you may want to lock or unlock files, or perhaps remove invisible files. 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. 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.DSStore 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: ) writes about more than just Macs on his blog.

Kirk is the author of. Want to stay up to date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the for a weekly email summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your Inbox. You can also.

It's probably a sign that we are just one bad decision away from being evil crime lords, but we looked at this and all thought exactly the same thing: you could use this software to change the dates on contracts to 90 years ago and claim to have invented Boeing. Or, on a slightly smaller scale, we could've told our college professors that of course we started this report at the start of the semester. That really is the kind of thing we can do with - ABFA for short - but it's intended more for the kind of fine and morally upstanding person that you are.

Mac App Store (Mac), free and safe download. Mac App Store latest version: Apple's dedicated Mac App Store. Free app store download for mac.

A Better Finder Attributes For Windows

So imagine you're compiling all the photographs your family took on your last vacation. If four people went, two of them at least can be guaranteed to have never set the date on their cameras, so every shot is timestamped January 1, 1901. Or if you've put off dealing with it all for six months, and now somehow the dates on every shot are the day you imported the photos rather than when they were shot. You'd live with that if there weren't many shots, and you wouldn't even notice it if there were only a few - but get a few thousand shots together, and you'll be wondering why all of Bert's are sorted at the bottom of your folders. A Better Finder Attributes 5 requires OS X 10.7 or later, and costs $15 from the official site.

Confusingly, the same app is sold on the Mac App Store under the name for the same price by the same developer. Who is A Better Finder Attributes 5 for: Anyone who burns to be very organised, has to submit all work somewhere on the same date, has a fiddly date problem, or is planning to claim they wrote the Declaration of Independence. Who is A Better Finder Attributes 5 not for: Most people - it's one of those utilities you will rarely need, but are extremely glad of when you do.

William Gallagher.