I know that many of your here love collecting the art out of the various art dumps in here, for inspiration or just because it's cool, whatever; and I know that many of you, like me, have built collections with thousands of images in them.
How do you sort and organise them?
Like with the character art, it'd be really helpful to organise them by theme (nordic/medieval/'desert'/cyberpunk, etc) but at the same time, I'd really like to have them sorted roughly by 'class' as well (fighters/knights/mages/priests) etc. Using folders to do this breaks down immediately, and then there's all the ones that don't fit neatly into categories, or would be great in separate categories (say, I really want to put something in an 'elf' folder, but would love it in an 'archer' folder as well). I could copy paste them but that quadruples the time it takes to sort, instead of instantly dragging+dropping.
Windows 7 has a 'tag' system which would be perfect for this, but it's fucking murder writing out tags individually for each one. I'd fucking love a way to do by batches.
Given there's programs that happily find all the duplicates in my collection, surely there's good organisational ones too? I've googled around but I've either only found dodgy looking paid programs aimed at grandmas that probably only do what Windows already does, or really really barebones stuff off github that need weird runtimes and whatever and that I can't get to run.
I'll dump cool locations that aren't posted here often in the meantime.
I do mine by themes. Though sometimes I do more contrived sorting for the more broad categories. Didn't know about the tagging system. Thanks.
Blake King
I mostly do it by month at this point. Been doing so for about a year. 100-300ish per folder, doesn't take too long to scroll through 300 tumbnails and I get to see what I'm interested in changing over time.
Use to do it by theme but that shit got too vague.
Ayden Perry
I don't because it's too late now.
I've got almost 9000 loose files in my downloads folder.
Brayden Rivera
I have made a horrible mistake.
Jason Richardson
Like this
Joshua Ward
It takes like 15 minutes to go through 500 images
Sebastian Thomas
That's still almost 5 hours of repetitive, mind-numbing work. I quit my data entry job for a reason, user.
I use folders. At first it was a little awkward, but eventually I figured out a system. I have a tree system of folders for finding art. My art folder is split into: characters, landscapes, scenes and items (pretty self explanatory)
Then characters is mostly split into races (plus an extra folder labelled "evil" and there is one folder labelled "other" for a lot of miscellaneous races that don't pop up in art very much). Each folder is then split into male and female. Then each folder is split into classes or few extra categories like steampunk and cyberpunk depending on what race it is.
Landscapes is just separated based on the terrain eg desert, ocean, mountain, cold, city etc
Basically you have to ask yourself how you use your art. I for example tend to create a character in my head then look for the art. So if I create a feral Orc shaman npc I would go into characters => Orcs => Male => Wild and there it'll be. Just look at the questions you tend to think about when creating a character and create a folder tree that answers those questions sequentially.
If a folder gets too large I divide it into more specific folders. For example I used to have a folder in Humans that was just labelled "knights" and it included all humans wearing noticeable armour. This folder became huge so I split it into "knights" and "soldier," knights requiring that a helmet be on and wearing full plate, soldier for all other types of armoured humans.
It takes a bit of upkeep, but its really quick for me to find any kind of art I like.
Aiden Cox
>sort
3 folders: Papes, reaction and misc.
>organise
Papes has six subfolders for saved pics of HD aspect ratio (largely for my Screen Saver slideshow).
Reaction has six subfolders for alphabetisation of an extensive image macro collection.
Misc has six subfolders: OUT basket (Print Queue), Personal (hobbies, etc.), Politics, Senpai, IN basket (Camera DL target) and Other.
[shrug] Works for me.
Parker Williams
* Where (s e n p a i) = f a m i l y photos. Thanks, Mr. Mutu.
Carter Baker
I have two overall image stockpiles; Futuristic and Fantasy. Fantasy is a folder filled with subfolders; each subfolder is named according to the contents. For fantasy, I have folders like 'Fighters', 'Magi' and 'Rogues', for player character appropriate pictures, or NPCs, as well as 'Groups' that comprise stuff like group shots, group portraits or pre-encounter pictures like 'You see this , roll initiative' type shit.
Ontop of that, I have 'Magic Items', 'Maps', 'Monsters', 'Portraits' 'Scenery' and 'Symbols'. All but Symbols is self-explanatory, whereas Symbols is used for magic circles, symbols, runes and other esoteric stuff that is usually important for a puzzle.
Within each folder, images are given appropriate names to force them into subgroupings for easy finding; all my Undead monsters are given names like 'Undead Ghoul', 'Undead Lich', etc. Under Rogues meanwhile, it'll be by race; 'Human Rogue 1, Lizardman Rogue 1,' etc.
Nathan Nguyen
OP here, thanks for the replies! The thread was on about the last row when I went to bed so it's great to see a healthy thread
Thanks! Looks like what I was after
Aaron Rogers
Meanwhile my Sci-Fi folder is specifically an Eclipse Phase folder at the moment, since it's the only game I plan to run at any point. Same basic idea, just different groupings of 'Biomorphs, Infomorphs, Maps, Misc Pods, Portraits, Scenery, Soldiers, Synthmorphs, Varied, Vehicles and X-Risk Threats'. Varied is mostly for .gif stuff that looks useful, Misc is full of stuff ranging from extra-terrestrial life, gun examples and some other weird shit.
Brandon Price
As an idea; here's a shot of my fantasy folder and the contents of the Fighters folder. Hope it helps.
Julian Lopez
As an example; a shot of my Fantasy folder and the contents of one of said folders. Hope it helps.
Aiden Bennett
I sort the folders by themes, and then use file names for second layer sorting. So, my "Demonic/Occult" folder has anything that could belong in a Baator/Abyss kind of place, and then individual files will be called things like "Knight - Emaciated" or "Cleric - Faustian." Except my skeleton folder. My skeleton folder just has normal file names. That's because I can find specific classes by looking for "Skeleton [whatever]" so I didn't bother changing them in the Great Reorganization.
Isaiah Miller
>21st century >using folders instead of tags to manage fuckhuge pic libraries
Carson Smith
>any year >using tags or folders because you can't memorize everything perfectly with your untermenschen brain
Jaxson Price
A lot of my pictures are used on an old outdated tablet that doesn't support tags in any context; using my folders method is a lowest common denominator tactic that ensures it'll always do what it's meant to do.
Cameron Cruz
You could integrate the tags directly in the filename, then you could search for them on any platform.(a pretty cool app called TagSpaces does just that) But I hear you. Tag cross-platform portability is still a clusterfuck, overall, with so many competing standards, and lukewarm integration in file management apps...
Brayden Wood
That one's great.
Adam Richardson
This is the one thing that is fast and don't need to use another software if you don't want to tediously type all of them tags for future search.
Parker Powell
This is absolutely the way to do it.
Asher Reed
Well the meaningful tags are already in the filenames already like I showed above. Race and archetype is all that really matters for the most part.
Ethan Sanders
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Aiden Kelly
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Owen Moore
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Aaron Perry
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Luis Murphy
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Easton Martin
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Eli Flores
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Oliver Powell
I have a very basic folder setup similar to anons here, with simple categories like landscapes or character art. it's tedious to sort through at the moment, and I'll break it down some in the future, but for now it's adequate. I'll bump with some landscapes of my own since those are rarer than characters art threads.
