Organising scrapping supplies

One of the most difficult things I’ve had to do is to organise my ditgital scrapping supplies. The quantity of them grew at a phenomenal rate and pretty soon, I had an explosion of files and folders which I needed to search through, browse and protect with regular backups.

Fortunately, I have reviewed in the past various document management programs and some of these programs were really good for image organisation so I had a head start. I have tried ACDsee, but I found it unsatisfactory. Bridge, which comes with PS will do the same thing and a better job but I haven’t bothered with it either. I also have Paperport Professional which is far superior to ACDSee or Bridge but is also a bit pricey.

Instead, I use windows explorer which is simple, fast and it is already there. I’ve found a utility that enlarges thumbnails (not needed if you have Vista) so I can see them better and I use a logical folder and sub-folder structure.

ACTIONS & TEMPLATES
ELEMENTS
- Alphas
- Brushes
- Frames
- Dates Calendars
- Journals
- Stitches Buttons Staples
FONTS
KITS
- Water themes
OVERLAYS & SWIRLS
PAPERS
SEASONAL
- Christmas
- Celebrations
CT Designers
- Debra Tope
- Zig Zag Scraps

Windows has a really good search function and I use it to search file names. Between that and the larger thumbnails, I can find pretty much anything with a visual or file name search. I can also open multiple windows, something which some programs won’t let you do. So, while I’m scrapping, I will have two or three instances of Windows Explorer open. One for the photos, one for the supplies I’m using and one for searching.

I download new purchases to a folder called “NEW” and it stays there until I can organise it. When I unzip a new purchase, the first thing I do is delete the extra files like the piracy notice, rename the preview file to folder.jpg and make sure that the folder has the designer’s name at the beginning of it so that everything is in alphabetical order by designer name. Then, I copy it to a backup drive and move it to the right folder. The zip file is moved to another backup drive which I take off site.

The windows utility to enlarge thumbnails is called TweakUI and is found at Microsoft. This utility is not necessary for Vista but is a great help for earlier versions of Windows (eg XP).
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/d…powertoys.mspx

I hope this helps those that can’t buy another program or need to organise their digi scrapping supplies but don’t want to or can’t painfully index each file.

You may also like these articles:

This entry was posted on April 13, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Scrapbooking, tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.