Header graphic made from Scrap and Snap TDD member exclusive kit and doodle from Scrapping 9 to 5 by Kate Hadfield
A DIGITAL MESS
I’ve been digital scrapbooking since 2006 and my basic folder organization had remained the same until recently: I downloaded new products into a master folder called “Scrap Supplies” and unzipped them there. Once I used them, I moved each product to a folder by type: alphas, kits, element packs, and templates. Fast forward a few years and those folders were getting huge!
A few years ago, I bought the file manager program ACDSee in an attempt to use keyword tags to organize the supplies I had in those folders. When I first bought the program, I used keyword tags on I everything owned. I mean literally everything! I opened up all my kits and tagged them down to individual staples and buttons. I even tagged all my papers with colour keywords. My list of keyword tags was so long that I had to scroll through it!
After a while, I joined some creative teams (CTs) and began to scrap more and more, with several new products a week. I could no longer keep up with tagging every item, so I switched to tagging just previews, except for templates, where I still tagged every individual template.
TIME TO RETHINK
After my Great EHD Crash of 2012 and subsequent restore experience, I decided to reorganize my folders. Why now? Well, I had in my hands a perfect back-up of everything on my computer in the form of my restore EHD. So, I could mess with my folders and if I didn’t like it at the end, I could painlessly go back. The time was right!
My first order of business was to tackle my folder organization. I wanted to have smaller folders (to help them load faster) and make the folders themselves reflect how I scrap.
I really like the idea of being able to pull “this” from one kit and “that” from another kit and make a page. But, that’s just not me. I am a one-kit scrapper for the most part. So, all I really need to tag is the previews of products.
After some reflection, I realized that I also think of my products mostly by store and designer because of my CT commitments. Even when I scrap with other (non-CT) products, I am often participating in a challenge at an individual store, so I still need to be able to find products from a particular store or designer.
NEW ORGANIZATION: FOLDERS
I updated my products so that they are now organized in folders by Store>Designer. As I download new products, I move them right away into their Designer’s folder. This keeps my folder sizes manageable. If a designer moves stores, I can easily drag their folder into their new store’s folder. Similarly, if a designer retires, I can move them to a ‘Retired’ folder.
NEW ORGANIZATION: KEYWORD TAGS
After making the decision to only tag product previews, I was able to simplify my keyword listing substantially:
You can see that my kits and elements have sub-folders. These are:
Kits: Birthday Kits, Boy Kits, Christmas Kits, Girl Kits, Halloween Kits
Elements: Arrows, Birthday, Borders, Brushes, Butterflies, Christmas, Doodles, Fasteners, Flowers, Frames, Hearts, Journal Spots, Masks, Paint/Glitter, Papers, Paper Tears/Curls, Ribbon/String, Shape Templates, Stars, Stitching, Word Art
(I’m going to see how these tags work for me, but I may reduce the number of element pack tags in the future.)
Tagging just the previews gives my organization a “store” feel. So, if I want to find a template, I select the keyword “template” and here’s what I see:
And for kits I have something similar:
This was an excellent start! Next I added in keyword tags for stores and designers. So, if I want all my products by a particular designer, I click on her keyword tag and all her products appear!
The folders themselves are organized by Store>Designer, but it was only a short project to add these designer keyword tags to product previews and a benefit is that I can add multiple designers to each collaboration kit preview without actually storing the kit in multiple locations.
I also like tagging stores and designers so that I can quickly find all their products prior to purchasing new ones – hopefully this will help me avoid duplicate purchases!
Just like for folders, it is super-easy to change keywords if a designer moves stores or retires. (Just select all a designer’s products and ‘un-check’ the old store keyword and then ‘check’ the new store keyword. Done!)
SEARCH POWER
Now that I am no longer tagging individual elements, I rely on the search function within ACDSee to help me find the occasional “extra” item I want on a page that may not be within the kit I’m using. If I search for *butterfly* or *staple*, I’ll get a good list of files in my Scrap Supplies folders. Will I get results showing every butterfly or staple I own? No. Search will only show the ones that the designer has named with the words in the file name. So, if there is a butterfly named “ABCDesigns_el02”, it won’t show up in the search. Fortunately, more and more designers are giving descriptive names to their products.
I haven’t had a chance to do it yet in my new organization system, but soon I’m going to tag all my go-to items – my favourite staples, kraft papers, white papers, plain tags, stitches, etc. Katie posted about the idea of doing that here. It’s great!
EMBEDDING METADATA
One of the pitfalls about earlier versions of ACDSee is that the metadata was not embedded in each tagged file. In newer versions you can embed metadata. I have ACDSee 14 and you do it via the following menu choices:
If you want more information about metadata, read Steph and Kayla’s post about What Metadata Is and Why You Should Care.
ABOUT A DAY
It took me about a day (on and off) to reorganize my digital supplies and tag everything according to my new system – I’d estimate over 1500 previews tagged in various categories. So, even if you’ve been scrapping for years, I can say with experience that it is not too late to get organized or reorganize!
So far I’m quite happy with it! I can find everything easily and tagging new purchases is painless.
If you want more information about other ways to organize, check out all of our organization posts here.
How do you organize your scrap supplies? Do you use a similar folder/tagging system? Something totally unique? Tell us about it in the comments!
Share This Using…
I actually use Microsoft OneNote to organise all my digi supplies. I followed a tutorial on Hummie’s world (can’t find the link atm, will come back). It is just amazingly easy. Also my entire catalog is synced to the cloud and is available anywhere I am with the one Note app. Adding things is super easy. The only problem is moving files on my hdd would require manual updating of the location of the file in One Note.
Never been so organised in my life! If I could change one thing though I’d use the store folder before my designer folders as that’d be easy. But I could just add a store tag to the top of each page of the designer.. *wanders away pondering*
Oh and I forgot to mention I use Microsoft sync toy to make sure u second hdd is always in sync with my scrapbookkng ehd and backed up!
Great article and comments, too! I bought ACDSee 10 four years ago and have not found a reason to upgrade before now. The metadata filing might be a reason to upgrade. My problem was even four years ago, I had too much digi stuff to tag every item. Even with annual purges, I still have too much. But it might be worthwhile to tag previews, I don’t think every folder has a preview, especially some of the older stuff. ACDSee 10 sometimes slows down my system, and sometimes it stops altogether and I have to restart the program, and sometimes it refuses to delete a file unless I close out and open again. Does ACDSee 14 fix some of those issues?
Very interesting tip to use the search button in Windows Explorer. Thanks.
I keyword previews in Lightroom. I have my supplies organized in folders by designer mostly. Some are in class folders.
Oh, I can relate, Christine. :-/ I have been struggling to figure out a way to tag my many digital scrapbooking files and like you, have been disappointed and thwarted many times already. I started by tagging everything in Windows Live Photo Gallery. All good…until I had to restore from backup. Then the only tags that remained were those on my PSD files. All the JPG and PNG tags were gone. Heartbreaking! Turns out that they don’t save that data with the files but in some sort of local way that doesn’t, it seems, get backed up when you do a backup. And no one could suggest a way to back up the info from WLPG so I gave up doing any tagging there.
I love the interface in Picasa and use it all the time for making quick collages, finding photos by scanning through folders, etc. But I spent hours tagging photos by face recognition in Picasa and just like WLPG, lost ALL of that work in a backup/restore. All of the .ini files were also backed up and restored so I don’t know why that failed. But I won’t go through all that effort again in any program until/unless I get verification that it will save the “people” tags. But I digress.
I have PSE and use it for creating pages, but I hate the photo organization interface and it is as slow as molasses to boot so I haven’t tried using it for tagging. I expect it has the same issue with PNGs and JPGs that the others do in any case.
So while I love the idea of being able to tag supplies with multiple sets of information without overloading it all into filenames or folder names, I’ve wasted SO much time just tagging that I’m reluctant to ever go that route again unless I know it will “stick” through backup/restore.
In the meantime, I use a folder structure that follows the “type” of file or group of files (e.g. templates, elements, words + text, paper, kits) and that helps me find things…kind of. For now, I’ll just keep muddling along…but hope there’s a good solution out there waiting for me to discover it.
I have a bunch of folders… If I have a lot of kits from one store, I will start a store folder. The same is true for kit designers. My favorite designers get their own folders. I always organize my templates by designer. I have a Christmas folder, but it’s the only themed folder. I used to copy all the alphas and put them in the alpha folder, but I’ve stopped doing that as I rarely use alphas anymore. All of my supplies are on an external hard drive. I need to get another one to make a backup copy. I have a Project Life supply folder on my laptop, and I use that all the time now that I’m doing mostly PL layouts. I’ve found that what I look for in kits has changed since beginning PL. I used to care a lot about having neutral, textured background papers and lots of colorful embellishments (especially buttons, fasteners, and frames), but now I look for colorful patterned papers, and of course, great journaling cards. I buy more paper packs these days than full kits. My PL folder is growing, and I’m realizing that if I’m not careful in how I organize it, it’s going to get out of hand. I need to integrate it into my regular supply stash, and then just keep copies on my laptop for easy access. I don’t tag anything. I don’t like the automatic features of Picasa or the Organizer in PSE. I want more control over where stuff is. I love the idea of using the search feature in the Windows 7 folders that Sarah DG mentioned. Anyway… That’s how I organize my stuff!
I also organise my supplies by store and then designer, but I do tag each file too. This enables me to open a particular store or designer in Adobe Bridge, and then filter by what I’m looking for, which is really helpful and speeds up my scrapping. The only thing that takes time, as my supplies grow, is waiting for all the previews to appear in Bridge in the first place, but once they’re open, it’s so fast.
I use the themed folder system that Katie uses. I love it because it works with the way I scrap and there is no upkeep. I just drop each new download into its appropriate folder and I’m done!
I’ve commented here before about how I’m a big fan of Picasa and I use it all the tune to search by filename. (Typing “ribbon” and getting results of all files with “ribbon” in the name, for example.) I’ve recently discovered that windows 7 can do the same thing. In each folder, there is a search box at the top right. While in my main digi supplies folder, I can type “button” and all files with “button” in the filename will appear, just like in Picasa!
I hope I’m not the last person to discover this, ha ha! I don’t remember having this option in my last version of windows, which was Vista. I upgraded to 7 a few months ago and noticed the search box there. Fabulous!
Sarah DG
Gasp! I did not know that about the little search box in Windows 7! I just tried searching for “button” in my Project Life supplies folder, and voila, there are all the buttons! So Cool! Thank you for sharing that little tip!
I took a photo flow class and discovered I’m a kit scrapper so like you I only tag or want to rage my previews. I’m also a mac person which makes it all a bit more complicated.
The past week I spend trying out demos and trial of what is called DAM, Digital Assets Management. Companies were so kind to send me a trial or demo and I had high hopes to be able to tag the png’s. We all know png’s are the problem child in the Digital scrapbooking world. Ir would have been great if all would use tiff instead of png, that would akes things easier. But as it is we need to work around the png issue.
LR does not read png at all so for that software we would need to convert them to tiff. Files will get bigger when converting to tiff but do not need to get that much bigger. I could go into detail about how tiff files are written,but I won’t don’t worry. Basically there are 2 ways, to simplify this info, one is Motorola’s way and the other is Intel’s way. Motorola way is called te Big Endian and Intel’s way is called Litte Endian. By having conversion software where you can choose which you want to use you will save Los of disk space . The Big Endian file takes so etimes up to 3 times a large, a 500k png can become easily 1.5MB tiff. Little Endian makes that much smaller. A significant reduction over how the way it was.
After figuring that out moved on to real DAM software for Mac.
I started with an ACDSEE Pro trial. All went well until it hit my large folder and everything came to a stand still.The spinning ball appeared and every click a new ball. A quick look learned me that ACDSEE was using 150% of my brand new iMac’s CPU. Not good! It wouldn’t go any further and I was left with a 50% indexed digi supplies and the database was 11GB! Not enormous for a decent robust data manager. I have about 150,000 individual images in my designer folder. Peanuts for a good DAM. For a price of $139 I expect more.
Next up was Extensis PortFolio.
I know Extensis because it’s a local Portland company and from my designer days from their famous software Suitcase, a way to manage your fonts.
Unfortunately Portfolio had the same problem as Aperture has they do not show png’s correctly. They add squares/blocks of color to it. After discussing this problem with my Software Architect and ‘ did a thesis on imaging’ husband it turns out this is an png alpha channel transparancy problem. It needs to be fixed in the code.
Next DAM software is also a local, namely PhotoMechanic from Camerabits. PM 5 will be out soon with a brand new spanking catalog program. I urged them to fix the transparency issue that they also had a problem with.
Qpict was another smaller and simplere DAM I tried but had the same issues with png’s .
I was getting dissappointed.
Tried PSE Organizer 10 in would index but became unworkable slow after it indexed, constant generating thumbnails. For me as a kit scrapper Organize does not work well as you can not see the folder structure. For me to be able to browse I need to be able to see the designer folder with all the names etc.
Desperate I started up Picasa. Told it to index all tens of thousands images with little hope it would work and wheeled away to get some espresso, I could need that by now. To my surprise it did a great job I design all my files very neatly, you can tag png’s and it has an experimental feature that you can search for colors. I searrched for green and it showed me 231 green paper files that I did not even tagged yet. Tried some more with yellow and that also worked great! Who knew?
Than I heard about Kayla’s upcoming plan to use ACDSEE lite for a class, available in the app store for $12.99. According to the reviews this should not have the same memory problems that the Pro version had. Be aware that ACDSEe does not make their databases backwards compatble. Up till now if you upgraded you got the surprice that you could start indexing again,
I took the chance and purchased it.
It didn’t have the memory problem bu it has another problem, you can not tag it or use meta date with it. They advice not to tag all together. In their words, tagging is just a temporary way to set some files away. Instead the urge you to make categories. One for previews for instance, one for alphas and you vpcould make one for paper and make sub categories such as green, black, red etc.
There is no way to tell for me what happens to this categories. Is in embedded ad metadata? Or just added as some kind of tag. You can not find it in the help files either. I will wait for Kayla’s class, maybe she knows the magic words.
As it is, I don’t trust those categories at all. I can see that becoming total messed up when a software update arrives because this is a piece of software that needs a lot of work. In the preferences for instance, you can tell it to index all files or not … ??? There are no selection option which files you would like to see, just yes, all files or no. I would like to exclude .pfd’s, doc’s, texts etc, but there is no way to select this.
So in the end after testing 5 software programs I have Picasa, a not-for-me working version of PSE organizer 10 and a packed out version of the very basics of ACDSEE.
I wish there were better options
Would love to use LightRoom but converting so many files to tiff scares me
Well so far my extensive report on Mac DAM software. I hope you find it useful!
If there are questions I’m happy to answer!
Be well,
–
Christine
Wow, you make me happy I decided to basically create a favorites file by putting stuff in iPhoto and living with the funny display. It’s usually good enough to see if I want to use it, and I noticed if you set the background to black things display better. Maybe I will check out Picasa as well.
I did not explain how I organize my stash. I have 2 2 TB EHD’s. One holds all my stash and the other is a back-up with all the zip files and photos. Plus I have an automated back-up off side from Sugarsync. Not only does it back it all up to the cloud somewhere but it also syncs all my files. That way if I’m working on my iMac and want to carry on later with a project on my laptop all files are in sync. The EHD is connected with FireWire(blazing fast) to my iMac but I can access it wirelessly with my laptop or iPad for that matter.
Im a graphic designer and am used to work with projects for clients. When I start a project I make a sketch, browse for the photos, if any, I want to use and the kit that fits what I have in mind. I make a work folder on my computer or laptop and copy the files I need to that folder.After I finished with the project, I write a note of what i used and delete the kit and photos, but keep the .psd file of course. The note I write in the info of the lay- out. I do this by selecting the finished lay-out and doing cmnd-i, you get the info window, and at the bottom is a space that says ‘spotlight info’. And there I type the items I used. This way I can use Spotlight search and see in one go what I used for this work of art. Or if I wanted to I could search by designers name and come up with all the lay-outs I made with her work. It’s pretty neat.
I back the project up to the personal-projects folder on the EHD.
I have my stash organized in a folder I call Supplies. It contains sub-folders that work for me. One large designer folder with the names just like they label their work. For instance Rosey Posey is lmurphy and Sinkerdoodle is sd. That way I can quickly unzip the files and put them in the corresponding folders. Than I have subfolders for he stuff that has no designer folder. Alphas, clusters, scripts, single papers, single elements, templates, overlays/brushes/stamps, textures, tutorials. If there is a blog hop or a blog train I keep all the files in that particular folder. So it all mixes and matches.
I also have a few projects I subscribed to like Tangie’s Art Journal, Follow Your Art, TDD, 52 weeks from Sue Cummings and Vicky Segall, plus the classes I take like One Little word, those all go in the Supplies-> Projects folder.
I have one themed folder for Christmas and Winter, but since I don’t like taking kits out of the designers folder I make aliases to those kits.
By just tagging all my previews I can quickly go to that kit. With Alphas I don’t tag the complete alpha but just the letter A. So when I do a search for Alpha I don’t end up with hundreds of files but just all A’s. Same for dates and months. I learned that from Elements Organizer 10 that puts all your similar files like Alphas in one neat stack, so you only see the A or the 1. Very cool feature.
And that is how I have organized my Supply folder structure. Now all I need is the software to index it. I used Extensis Portfolio to manage my work related files because they index more than just jpg, they also index docs and pdf’s and text files. But those pesky png files keep me from using excellent other DAM software.
Have to apologies for the many typos. I have insomnia and thought, at the time, it would be a good idea to write this on my iPad. Auto-correction does strange things sometimes. Reading it again this morning my toes curl over the many typos. Alas, nothing I can change
Christine,
Converting to TIF isn’t hard to do at all. You can do it within PSE with their batch process option (or Anna Forrest has a simple script with additional options), or using a batch processing action in PSCS. (I have one in my store.)
Another option would be to just rename your PNGs to include a few tags in the filename. Then you can search on filenames, limit it to images and bring up search right in Finder.
I started tagging all my previews in lightroom as well, but I messed up and tagged them on my computer and then moved them to my EHD, breaking the links from lightroom. I learned (too late) that I needed to use Lightroom to move the files instead of finder. Or, wait until they are on my EHD before I tag them. So, I’m back to no tagging and relying on general searches and my brain filing system.
Great article and you’ve reminded me to back up my computer today. One thing I do with templates is tag by how many pictures it is for. I label them “templates 1″ (one pic), “…2″, “…3″, and “…4+”. I’ve found this to be very helpful to me as I have a lot of templates. I’m using Adobe Bridge, and I will tag the actual template and discard the previews as that is redundant for me. Have a great weekend!