{"id":59405,"date":"2026-01-13T13:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T21:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/?p=59405"},"modified":"2026-01-13T11:44:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T19:44:42","slug":"tutorial-tuesday-potpourri-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/2026\/01\/tutorial-tuesday-potpourri-40\/","title":{"rendered":"Tutorial Tuesday (Potpourri)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greatest Hits: Decluttering Isn’t Just for Homes<\/strong><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s January. It\u2019s 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\u2019re no truly exciting events on the horizon, so what\u2019s a girl to do? Well, the flyers are filled with supplies for organizing our stuff\u2026 But for Digi-Scrappers, we don\u2019t need to buy anything. It\u2019s 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 \u2018er done. This is how I do it, but I know y\u2019all have your own way of doing things, The important part is to DO it!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019ve amassed but haven\u2019t unzipped. This is actually my New Year\u2019s 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<\/strong>, 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\u2019m 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 \u201csingle4\u201d in the search bar and Windows<\/strong> will find all the previews with 4 photo spots. Once I\u2019ve 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!<\/p>\n

The way I sort my digikits is primarily by store or by designer\u2019s creative team, My GingerScraps<\/strong> folder is ENORMOUS!\u00a0 With Tinci Designs<\/strong>‘ retirement, I’ll be moving all her folders to a peripheral drive and my main GS<\/strong> folder will be much thinner. \ud83d\ude41\u00a0I rename each kit\u2019s folder: DesignerNameKitName, unless it\u2019s a Buffet<\/strong>\u00a0kit, then it\u2019s MonthYearBufDesignerNameKitName. That makes it easier when I\u2019m doing a store challenge.<\/p>\n

I try to organize my photos as I take them, so the job isn\u2019t too daunting. I don\u2019t care for the\u00a0Organizer<\/strong>\u00a0that comes with\u00a0Photoshop Elements<\/strong>\u00a0so I don\u2019t use it. But it can be very useful for both organizing and retrieving your photos. The\u00a0Help<\/strong> menu can give you some ideas about how to maximize your efficiency. The way I file my photos is in folders\u2026 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 \u2018steal\u2019 and one for the photos I download from Pixabay<\/strong>. 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\u2019m looking for.<\/p>\n

I also organize my layouts. I have folders for each month\u2019s 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\u2019 weddings, my grandkids\u2019 first years, all of my Ireland layouts and for the creative teams I\u2019m on. It\u2019s all about finding things later!<\/p>\n

I (once again) haven\u2019t taken the time to go through my 1400+ fonts and retag them for MainType<\/strong>. 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\u2019s 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\u2019m looking for later. The best part of MainType is that I<\/strong>\u00a0decide what my tags are, based on\u00a0MY<\/strong>\u00a0workflow \u2013 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\u2019s move on!<\/p>\n

One caveat. If you\u2019re going to delete duplicate files, make sure you only delete the ones you\u2019re not going to want to search for later. I made the mistake of using a Windows<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested to hear how YOU organize your stuff. So please, share your secrets!<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greatest Hits: Decluttering Isn’t Just for Homes It\u2019s January. It\u2019s 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\u2019re no truly exciting events […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[229,102,284,92,62],"tags":[373],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 09:03:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"private","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59406,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59405\/revisions\/59406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}