Extremely Slow File Renaming

So I'm running Mavericks (10.9.4) on a 2013 iMac with 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 Processor and 16GB 1600MHz DDR3, and I'm having this issue where, when going through and renaming a sequence of files, Finder starts to run progressively slower with each rename. This can be seen in the video below, and it should be noted that during this video there are 0 applications launched, and the only background applications are: Dropbox (not syncing anything), 1Password, CloudApp, and Private Internet Access. I also took the liberty of disconnecting both my 4TB and 2TB external drives, however that did nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odj4XNFUP_Y

Does anyone have any suggestions for this? In my searching for a solution I found that some people repaired permissions in Disk Utility as well as going into Terminal and disabling Finder auto-sleep, however that did nothing, as this video was captured after that had been done and the computer had been restarted.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, as this is killing my productivity! I have 400 files I need to go through and rename for my organizational purposes, and at this rate it will take a ludicrous amount of time. Thanks!

Where are the files located?
How many files are in the folder?

They're on my local disk, buried a few folders into the default "Pictures" folder. The number of files in each folder doesn't seem to affect the slowing-down-ness, but one folder, for example, has 169 items totaling 468MB.

I have found that if I force close Finder it tends to reset the process, but eventually after naming 10 files it starts to slow to a crawl once again. So I'm able to do that as a bandaid fix, but it seems the core problem should hopefully be something that's fixable long-term.

As an experiment it may be worth copying one of those folders to a shared folder, create a new user, log into that user and try again