How do you guys organize your character art?

Character->male/female/group/obscured->magic/martial/ranged/rogue/civilian/other

and for anime style

JRPG->male/female/group->class (once I get around to it)

also relevant

Troops->archer/infantry/cavalry/artillery (needs resorting to include some tech level distinction)

Thematically.
Although it's not fully organized. The 0s are there so I can keep it organized by name, but keep them above the loose pictures that start with numbers

Rough class, then a brief description.

It doesn't need to be perfect, though. I don't mind scrolling through a few images.

I branch them out if any one section gets to be too much.
>Fantasy
>>Warriors
>>>Mounted, Strength, Projection, Finesse, Tactical, Supernatural.
>>Magicians
>>>Eldritch, Phrenic, Unkind, Otherworldly.
>>Thieves
>>>Loud, Quiet, Ruthless, Resourceful.
>>The Faithful
>>>Divine, Primal, Anathema, Beyond.
>>Strangers
>>Wanderers.

>Good Ole' Charlie
>>Civies
>>Officials
>>Renegades

>Science Fantasy

>Science Fiction.

>Scenery

>Tables

I am very picky about the art I save.
So far I haven't saved enough to warrant more than just separating them by genre, and then male or female.

I don't, and it's really starting to become a problem...

The sooner you start organizing, the better. It took days to get it all filtered through after I decided to finally get it done because I waited for months and hundreds of char-art threads before I got around to it.

You're totally right, of course.

>Pictures
>TG
>Character Art
Classy - Racist
>Classy
Barbarian - Bard - Cleric&Paladin - Engineer - Fighter - Knight - Mage - Monk - Ranger - Rogue - Swashbuckler
>Racist
Animal Folk - Celestial - Demon - Dragon - Dwarf - Elf - Faery - Giant - Gnome&Halfling - Goblin - Human - Hybrid (Lamia, and driders) - Kobold - Nymph (Elementals) - Oni - Orc

OR

I can just delete it all and start again Like I've done six times total, now

I don't save images onto my computer. I look them up online as I need them, download them, and delete them afterwards. There's no reason to use up all that HDD space for something you use once and never look at again, I've found.

That's actually a refreshingly different perspective to someone like me who enjoys collecting images, among other things.

Organized by:
European Fantasy
Asian Fantasy
Sci-Fi
Current Day

And those folders are sorted by race
And then those folders are further sorted by class.

I don't

My character art folder is an absolute clusterfuck.

That is a much more efficient means than I had of a hard-reset after pitching my laptop full of year's worth of collection to the ground and fracturing the hard-drive like a dumbass.

I have a dump folder, then when I'm bored I name them based on race, sex, then descriptor

i.e. Dwarf Male heavy armor hammer mattock

I don't, sadly.
And now that I'm 6,000 images in it seems a little late to start.

/hydrus/

It's probably too late to do everything, but believe me, you can make a dent. Put on a podcast or something and just get to work. Even if you only get through a couple hundred, chances are next time you need something you can remember what you just went recently.

I organize my character art by genre of intended use, race, archetypal role, and a plausible build.
My Dark Heresy folder includes all of my 40k character referendum sorted by Background, as well as my enemies inspiration folders sorted by Within/Without/Beyond, and the filenames all start with the faction then specify what group or what role is being played. Case in point here

My shit is really unorganized, though. It's faster to just hit up the booru and slap keywords together to find whatever.

I have a folder for Characters/monsters, Background art and weapons.

Character art has a subfolder of waifus though, since I like to look at something nice when I work on my smut homebrew

Race > Gender > Archetype

Morrowind please.

Was just organizing that more. It's actually general elder scrolls crap.

By weight class and era.
Light/Renaissance

genre (modern/fantasy/scifi/etc)
-if not baseline human: species/extrahuman features (aliens, elves/dwarves/orcs/etc, animalfolk, cyborgs/androids/robots, etc)
-if 'normal' human: by class/weapon type (magic users, knights, rapier/'duelist', archer, guns, merchant/tradesman, ninja/rogue, etc)

Aaand that's pretty much it. Don't even bother renaming files for the most part, so I need to manually look through them for particular details I may want. Some of the categories are really vague/broad as well. I have what is essentially a 'fancy clothes' folder which... so long as the character doesn't have a weapon to fit into one of *those* categories... can be anything from kimonos to Victorian ballroom attire and royalty to harem/belly dancer in veils.

Should probably organize it a bit more than just that, but... meh.

I hate you so much for posting that gif. It's fucking with me so hard.

I only save stuff that really stands out to me for some reason or another, so everything I have (145 images) is all in the same folder.

I always include the artist's name in the filename, because ever since Google fucked up their algorithm it's a pain in the ass to find anything with it.

33,975 images, 80 folders and counting. It's a work in progress. I don't organize by gender. I generally just roughly stick pictures where I feel they belong.

An elf archer goes in the elf folder, not the archer folder. This is to ensure race folders aren't minuscule and I can find a suitable elf if I need one.

Cool space pictures and starscapes go in the space subfolder in the scifi folder, not locations. I shouldn't need spacey nebulas or stars unless I'm doing something scifi anyways.

Generally:
>Race
>Rough class
>Genre
>Theme

I haven't played a game yet.

You're the only other user I've ever seen shamelessly plugging Z's into folder names to sort them that I remember.

Yo, Win7 doesn't give me any other choice. If I want them at the bottom of the list because they're low priority I need a z to force them there.

BROTHER!

I really need to sort my folders better. Asian/African/Arabian/Egyptian/Greek in one folder is kind of wonky.

Asian/African/Arabian/Egyptian/Greek would work fine with a subfolder or few, I'd imagine.

Forcing myself to not visit art-threads nowadays so the backlog doesn't get huger. I swear I'm going to write a program one day specifically to sort images really goddamn quickly. Like, image preview + letter to send to a specific folder.

Genre > Human / / Humanoid / Non-humanoid > (Equipment, class or subspecies related folders).

by race. just like everything should be organized.

I keep them in folders of 250 and memorize the ones I really like for reference. Otherwise I don't.

>How do you guys organize your character art?
autobiographically

I have mine organized by Male and Female, then by fantasy race (Elf, Dwarf, Halfing/Gnome, Etc.) And currently working on dividing them further into class (Warrior, Thief, Priest, Mage)

Saw this joke coming from outside the observable universe, and I still chuckled.

If I have them, original title and author remain.
Then I add key words. Since I'm using a specific key words for well past decade, I'm perfectly capable of finding the right picture, just by searching the disc for specific words.
Part of the key words is also about OCs and homebrew settings, so it makes it much easier for me to navigate and getting specific results, while utterly impossible for others to decypher how the whole system works.

There is literally NO POINT trying to sort things by folders or separate them into smaller groups, as it only makes searching for the right stuff harder.

What if any pic can qualify to two different folders

Those anons get it

It's like you've condensed my entire life into Gif form.

I'm not sure what to name it. Maybe ethnicity?

Wow...I thought I had too many.

Teach me your ways, master.

I generally just sort by what seems the most pertinent. I'm pretty sure I go Genre > Race > Class. So this elf is in scifi, because I'll never want it if I'm looking for fantasy.

Tagging every single picture by content like a fucking booru is out of the question.

I just draw a new character every time.

Second for hydrus. Takes a while to get through things and you gotta figure out the whole tags thing but once you do it's pretty quick. I'm currently tagging around 4500 pictures and hoping to get through a good chunk so I can just share them all after new years.

By franchise. I only save art that's specifically for my characters though

Pictured: Princess Arminia Caliak, serving in her nation's Sky Force. Red cuffs indicate a skyship commander.

Name all my images like character-dwarf-warrior

>What if any pic can qualify to two different folders
I copy it to both

I organize them in a few simple categories.

>Fighters
>Mages
>Savages
>Scoundrels
>Nobles
>Townsfolk
>Monsters
>Worlds/Maps/Imagery
>Quick Tables

From there before I start a game, I'll get a theme and then start looking for artwork to fill my new themed world with. I make separate folders for the theme and go from there. If the campaign ends, or after I know longer need said images I'll organize them back into my general folders above, rinse and repeat.

At the moment I'm running a few different games and their folders are labeled seperatly from my main pool of art.

>The Masked Plague
>The Maelstrom of the Red Isles
>Return to the Dark
>The Icy Tomb
>etc.

It works for me anyway.

Putting it off for tomorrow.

Sorry in advance if Veeky Forums doesn't format this right.
Pictures
>Reference art
>Characters
>Male
>Human
>Non-Human
>[race]
>Female
>Human
>Non-Human
>[race]

I mean, that works but harddrive space I guess.

>Male
>Female
>Monster
>Monstergirl
>NSFW

I should probably further break it up into Fantasy/Sci-fi/etc though doing it on Imgur is a chore which I haven't gotten around to doing.

firstly it goes

>you have an image
1.) porn?
>yes
>no

>if no
2.) is it really?

if still no
3.) major class
>weapons
>hobbies
>/co/
>symbols
>misc

>if misc
4.) subclass
>people
>places
>things
>events
>creatures

if it makes it all the way to "people" then it is valid character art. people doesn't mean strictly human or even humanoid mind you...

Someone was sharing some Undead art last thread before it maxed out, so here's another for good measure.

Well I use character art to get my imagination flowing for character ideas. Usually I'll start with an idea, like "I want to play a caster" or something, then I'll check the propriate folded. So its good for my folders to have some variance and ambiguity.

then a copy of that image goes into more than one folder...

Duh...

>then a copy of that image goes into more than one folder...
Why the hell would you use a copy and not a shortcut? Imagine the bytes you could be saving!

I have a 2 Tb system with 2 full backups and a friend of mine set me up with a "save the oldest of 2 identical files" program in case of duplication

and I am prone to copying one folder or other to portable media to either lend out, or carry to other locations(like my "symbols" folder which I brought to my workplace when we got the new digital laser cutter system) and in those cases a shortcut would do me no good whatsoever.

I have multiple files and sub-files.
Angels
Brigands
Easter flavor
Armored
Magic users
Misc. Character Art
Misc Elves
Magic Users
Modern/Future
Monstergirls
Westerns
And then I have my 40K stuff.

You could do what I do and have separate NSFW folders for your other folders. Like NSFW Monstergirls inside your regular Monstergirls.

or he could sort all porn/nsfw away from regular images and keep analogous folders for both.

either way is fine...

But those two suggestions are essentially the same thing, just slightly different locations!

except the second option works wonders if you share a computer or have nosy parents, especially if you know ways to hide a folder that aren't simply selecting that option in the properties window

tmsu.org/

Basically a desktop implementation of -booru tagging.

pooly

I don't save character art.

>Not having 2TB harddrive just for pictures

Hydrus Network, it's a godsend. Primarily it allows you to organize media by tags, as well as lot of other neat stuff I have yet to read up on.

>Arms and Armour/Items
>Locations
>Monsters
>Warriors
>Wizards

I make a judgement call for each one, some clerics look more caster-y than others, that sort of thing.

big folder everything that's not a photo go's in it
little folder for pictures of real people

probably name it something related to what I is

>related to what I is
related to what *it is

put tags in the things title
use Ctrl+f to find
robo_paladin_centaur_NSFW_43.jig

>111,529 files

I just give everything a name I can search for and dump it in one folder

>Wasting 2TB of space due to shitty way of cataloging things
youtube.com/watch?v=_359l_9Wyhg

That's just locking into single box with no flexibility.

The real question is why to store multiple copies, rather than change the way the system is managed

As a non-collector who still wants to benefit from the wonderful work of others, do any of you ever upload your collections online?

>He thinks that's a lot
Not him, but I've store about 20k pictures yearly.

And before anyone asks - yes, I use this shit. I use it on regular basis. Otherwise I wouldn't be saving them nor bothering to invest into a portable disc just for the pictures.

>Uploading shit that is already in the net
What for?

Aside of course breaking copyrights and being a dick, since I don't even have authors for 5% of my collection.

It should be intuitive, and organised by most significant attribute. I would say that obviously the bare-breasted centaur is marked out more by being a centaur than having bare breasts. She should go in the Fantasy folder, and the centaur subfolder (trust me, even if you only start out with one pic in a particular subfolder, in a few years time you'll probably be very glad you started organising early. This is a lesson I learned the hard way).

My art folder looks something like this. I won't pretend its a perfect solution, but I have over five and a half thousand pics and I'm more or less keeping on top of things.

- Art
- Nature
- History
- Fractal Art
- Pop Culture
- Video Games
- SciFi and Fantasy
- SciFi
- BattleTech
- Cyberpunk
- Retro
- Star Wars
- Fantasy
- Fairies
- Merpeople
- Places and Landscapes
- Skeletons
- Monsters
- Dragons
- Lovecraft
- Sea Monsters
- Vampires
- Werewolves
- Warhammer
- Fantasy
- Spacescapes
- Surreal
- Creepy

I mean as an archive so that others can download it, not for profit or fame.

Given the amount of effort implied by the collectors in this thread, it'd be great to be able to get those without having to go through the exhaustive process oneself.

because I frequently take Chunks from the collection and not the whole collection.

a shortcut doesn't work unless you have the thing it shortcuts TOO.

my image collections are too large to make them easy to put on a single thumb-drive without getting in the way of other things that might be on the drive already.

My files architecture is roughly as follow:
>Inspiring
This file contains all pictures and files that could qualify as "character art". I have other external files, for example for graphs.
It contains several files. I will not name all of them, as some of them have nothing to do with character art; for example, I have a Maps file and a Landscapes file in this file.
>>Monsters
>>>Dragons
>>>Angels
>>Characters
>>>Photographs
>>>Anime
>>>Occidental anime
>>>Occidental
>>>Other
As you can see, I chose to organize the first level depending on the art style. I think it is the best way because it's easier to find a picture I'm specifically looking for that way: I will always remember its artstyle, which is pretty easy to determine objectively.
Among these Character files, only the Occidental one contains subfiles. That's because I have much more Occidental art than Anime art, so there's more of a need to organize it.
>>>Occidental
>>>>Pure sci-fi
Contains notably all that's cyberpunk.
>>>>Techno-fantasy
Contains notably all that mixes magic and industrial or post-industrial technology, as well as Star Wars.
>>>>Maybe IRL and post-apo
Contains notably pictures in the style of VeloCity.
>>>>Zoanthropes
Contains characters that do not qualify as monsters but are partly animal.
>>>>Pirates and seafarers
>>>>Knights
>>>>Wizards and Warlocks
>>>>Dark elves
Pretty straight forward.
>>>>Other medieval
Contains only characters that could exist in a realist medieval setting without magic. Does not require historial accuracy, though.
>>>>Other fantasy
Contains notably all elves, dwarves, and medieval things that looks magical without looking like wizards, such as paladins with obvious surnatural effects.
>>>>Neutral portraits
Contains only portraits that could probably be okay for most settings, whether medieval or not.
>>>>Fantasy portraits
Contains only portraits that obviously belong to fantasy.

sub folders inside sub folders inside sub folders inside main folders inside the mega folder

really its sorted into 3 main categories. porn, random shit, and fantasy artwork

I don't.
I have 5 GBs of fantasy and character art and it's mostly impossible to find anything on it.

poorly. After recovering about 3 gigs of character/setting art from my old harddrive that failed I accidentally combined both folders together. The problem was I was using two different sorting systems and a number of subsystems and now nothing really makes sense anymore. So now I have 9 gigs of character art and other roleplaying stuff mixed together in about 50 mainfolders and numberless subfolders. I don't want to even think about how many duplicates I have now.

Generally I try to keep the scifi/contemporary stuff all together and fantasy in another and then work from there based on themes/classes/races/specific settings. This sort of failed as a lot of stuff I got fails to go into a specific folder. I attempted using a hybrid tagging and folder system but I'm too lazy to go thru 90 gigs and adding tags to each. I feel like a hoarder of junk as most of it I don't use often. I generally keep all of it as references to my own sketches and for worldbuilding purposes.

Fantasy/Sci-fi porn and lewds are kept with the rest of my drawn porn in their own sizable folders

I actually keep mine really vague, purely because so many of them can fall into multiple categories if I get too specific, and I prefer not to duplicate pictures.

Most of mine are fantasy-themed. If they are, they get sorted by "Gender - Stat" since I've played a lot of games and those are pretty consistent across most of them. If they're in a non-fantasy setting, then it gets labeled as "Gender - Setting" instead. Demons, monsters, and the undead go into their respective folders, while Locations is mostly scenery or interesting city landscapes and such. Anything else I think will be useful but doesn't fit a previous category goes into Random Stuff, but that happens pretty rarely. I think there are like 9 pictures in there, total.

I've got a couple thousand in here so far and it works great for me.

I'm this user. Please tell me what picture with tag "xin olathe natural adult ice" could present. Entertain me, since this is a sincere request, not just sarcastic jab.