It’s January. It’s bone-chillingly cold in some parts of the world (although oddly enough, we’re having a very mild winter) and unseasonably warm in others. The holidays are over, and winter stretches out in front of us like a long and bumpy road. There’re no truly exciting events on the horizon, so what’s a girl to do? Well, the flyers are filled with supplies for organizing our stuff… But for Digi-Scrappers, we don’t need to buy anything. It’s all right in front of us! I think now is a good time to talk about organizing our stuff, and maybe actually making some effort to get ‘er done. This is how I do it, but I know y’all have your own way of doing things, The important part is to DO it!

It’s not as important where we start as that we actually DO start. For me, the place to begin will be with all the new kits I’ve amassed but haven’t unzipped. This is actually my New Year’s Resolution, to unzip and relocate my supplies as soon as I download them. I was keeping up just fine for awhile, don’t even ask me how it fell apart this time. I have a backlog, and I WILL attend to it. Eventually. I was using an unzip app but when I moved to my current laptop, I found the newest version to be.. unhelpful. So I went back to the labour-intensive single-folder method. It’s a tiny bit easier with Windows 11, but still laborious. I find it’s less work to create a new folder for those kits with multiple downloads, so they are all in one place when it’s time to ditch the stuff I’m never going to use. Then I don’t have to go back and search all the download folders to find the ones I’ve unzipped. I go through each of the subfolders, deleting all the duplicate previews and things I know I’m not going to use (like alpha sheets!). If the kit is templates, I delete the PNG files and the TIFF files, and I add to the name of the previews to include single or double and the number of photo spots the template includes. That lets me put a keyword like “single4” in the search bar and Windows will find all the previews with 4 photo spots. Once I’ve arranged my folders the way I like them, I move them en bloc to my digikit folder for the store or designer as appropriate. Then my download folder should be empty. Until I fill it up again!

The way I sort my digikits is primarily by store or by designer’s creative team, My GingerScraps folder is ENORMOUS!  With Tinci Designs‘ retirement, I’ll be moving all her folders to a peripheral drive and my main GS folder will be much thinner. 🙁 I rename each kit’s folder: DesignerNameKitName, unless it’s a Buffet kit, then it’s MonthYearBufDesignerNameKitName. That makes it easier when I’m doing a store challenge.

I try to organize my photos as I take them, so the job isn’t too daunting. I don’t care for the Organizer that comes with Photoshop Elements so I don’t use it. But it can be very useful for both organizing and retrieving your photos. The Help menu can give you some ideas about how to maximize your efficiency. The way I file my photos is in folders… what else? I create a new folder for the current year, and a subfolder for each month. (I used to religiously rename my photos for easier retrieval, but have gotten lazy lately. Sigh. Another task on the To Do List.) Photos go into the folder for the month and year they were taken so I have some frame of reference later. I have a folder for the photos my friend Sandy takes and graciously allows me to ‘steal’ and one for the photos I download from Pixabay. My Pixabay folder is broken down into subfolders by topic: Kids, Insects/Flowers, Animals, Portraits, Scenic and such. This method of filing makes it a lot faster to find what I’m looking for.

I also organize my layouts. I have folders for each month’s challenges, with subfolders for the challenges themselves. When the year is over, they all collectively are filed in a folder for the whole year. Then again, I have some folders that have copies of the finished layouts for my daughters’ weddings, my grandkids’ first years, all of my Ireland layouts and for the creative teams I’m on. It’s all about finding things later!

I (once again) haven’t taken the time to go through my 1400+ fonts and retag them for MainType. I lost a bunch of fonts when I set up this laptop, and have had to either track them down and download again, or just let them go. I really do need to get on with it! It’s a daunting task, but you know what they say. Focus on the first step. I know the time I spend on it now will decrease the time it takes me to find the one font I’m looking for later. The best part of MainType is that I decide what my tags are, based on MY workflow – how I search for things. And like everything else, if I work at it as I add new fonts, the amount of time I spend on it will go way down. My husband had eye surgery yesterday and we’re still working out how to navigate his limitations; I don’t know if I’ll have free time to actually start anything, never mind anything that requires focus and concentration. But just writing about it is giving me a rash, so let’s move on!

One caveat. If you’re going to delete duplicate files, make sure you only delete the ones you’re not going to want to search for later. I made the mistake of using a Windows utility and chose the wrong metric so it removed a LOT of my original templates and left me with the PSD files for the last layout I used them for. Retrieving the original template takes a lot of time but is necessary when I use the search feature to find previews for my desired number of photos. Oh, and maybe now’s a good time to BACK UP all your stuff.

I’m interested to hear how YOU organize your stuff. So please, share your secrets!