Mac Automater - File Rename Based of CSV

You second Ask for Finder Items should be Type: Folder, not Files.

This Automator application will process the CSV and rename correctly. Verify that your CSV has no duplicate colors in it though or you will either get an overwrite warning from Automator, or it will fail in the absence of approving an overwrite condition for duplicates.

Tested: macOS Sonoma 14.0. Not tested with a NAS filesystem though.

When you select the folder, single-click to select it, do not double-click into it.

I ran it again successfully.

You may want to add a line of code to test if the new file name already exists and skip overwriting it.

while IFS=, read old new
do
   # if new file exists, skip to next CSV entry
   [[ -f "${new}" ]] && continue
   mv "${old}" "${new}"
done < "${CSV}"
exit 0

Tried removing the AppleScript components from this, and using bash or zsh directly? Add some echo commands to see the values in the symbols being used; ugly-debugging. You’re most of the way there to the shell already, of course. See if the code without Automator involved works.

If you want to create this parsing yourself, IFS is one of the most common ways, though it’ll hit issues because CSV is a simple-looking, but… less than robust… file format. I’d consider a library for parsing the CSV file too, as embedded spaces and other characters can derail the rename. (What VikingOSX posted is immune to most of those messes, though is sensitive to extra or escaped commas.)

Preference-wise, I’d probably use “${1}” and “${2}” here and not shift, too. shift is an ugly hack that works around some really old argument-parsing limits when 10 or more arguments are needed. Using “${1}” and “${2}” are clearer.

One of the more common requirements for these sorts of questions is creating your own file or photo storage database, and that gets gnarly for other reasons. If that’s what you are more generally doing here, moving to a database and away from Numbers or Excel, and avoiding CSV more generally, and utilizing Exif as appropriate, can be a more robust approach.

When I get back to the Mac, I’ll post up some code.

Does your CSV include filename.jpg or just filename? The following works when tested with a comma separator:

and the following Automator solution:

If the CSV has a header, the row items are in quotes, a comma in the filenames, or you have omitted extensions in your CSV it will not work as coded.

Ordinarily, I would use the Zsh shell, no shift operator, and a more hardened CSV row and column processing, but I wanted to stick with the OPs effort, and the Bash shell. The Automator application as I have written it works just fine on Sonoma 14.0 and Monterey 12.7.9 with the same CSV data shown by the OP. Historically, I have even used a filter on the CSV to trim CR from CRLF entries on Windows.

What AppleScript? ;-)

That is great news and you are welcome.