Digi-Scrapping 101 - Organizing Part 2

This is the time-consuming part of organizing your scrapbooking supplies, but the part that will pay off huge dividends when you are working on layouts. And like I've said before - if you do this from the very beginning, as you go, it will not be overwhelming and a huge project (like it has been for me). Once you start going crazy downloading digital kits and supplies, you will very quickly find that you have a TON of stuff. So how are you supposed to remember who created what kit and find a certain kind of flowers when you are working on a layout? This is where organizational tagging comes in. (And yes, as a note here, I still think all of the folder breakdowns from the previous post are still necessary and helpful, even if you are going to tag each file because it helps you know where to download stuff to where to look for things).

I realized very early on that I would absolutely have to use a software program to tag all my scrapbook items so that I would be able to find them through a search tool (i.e., if I need a green ribbon, I search for green and ribbon and it brings up all my green ribbons). There are many programs available that can tag files, and you most likely already have one or more. For instance, if you have PhotoShop Elements, like I do, then it already has the Organizer where you can view your photos or scrapbook supplies. I also had Picasa on my computer that I use all the time to post pictures on our blog. Picasa, unfortunately, won't show PNG files automatically, which is what many digi files are (I think I have read online that you can maybe change this setting?). So I had to throw that one out at the beginning, What I also don't like about Picasa and PSE organizer is that you can't control how it shows all your files. It drove me totally crazy to have to sort through a mix of photos and scrapbooking files to look for anything - and it often does it by date, which is totally unhelpful when looking for digital kits. I have also heard from many peopole that some of the programs like the PSE organizer are WAY SLOW!!

I do, however, know that a lot of people can use PSE organizer and other programs to tag and organize their supplies and have a lot of success with it. I am not one of those people. I am a completely OCD, perfectionistic, organizational freak! And that's where ACDSee Photo Manager 9 comes in. I am going to go ahead and do a little infomercial right now for them because I LOVE this program. It is perfect for a perfectionistic freak like myself. It is really easy to use and does everything that I want and need it to do for me to be able to maximize my digi supplies. I read lots of threads in forums about organizing and this program kept coming up with lots of very satisfied reviews. I decided to download the free trial and knew within 10 minutes of playing around with it that it was exactly what I was looking for. And a couple tips on buying this - if you download the free trial, you get an email from them within a couple days with an offer to get $5 off. Or, some of the digital scrapbooking places like Oscraps give you a free digital scrapbooking kit if you purchase it from their website. There are also occasionally discount codes to get it for cheaper. My SIL, Sarah, was able to get 20% off. I just googled it and found some coupon codes HERE. For $32, this program is soooo worth it. I especially feel this way considering that the $35 I paid for it is one of the only financial investments that I have had to put into this whole digi-scrapping thing.

One of the other reasons I really like ACDSee is because there are a lot of different tutorials written by digi-scrappers to help you figure out how to organize and tag everything. There are excellent tutorials HERE and HERE. I am always afraid of new programs, so I was thrilled to have tutorials to help me learn how to use it and get ideas.

Whichever program you decide to use for tagging, you are going to have to once again create categories for how you will tag things. For example, color, theme or subject, type of element (paper, ribbon, staple, etc.) HERE is a link with some great ideas for the categories, regardless of what program (and if you decide to use ACDSee, you can actually just download these categories from the website and have them already created for you! So cool! And then you can just edit and change them to meet your needs). Update: HERE is another set of importable categories!

Tag as much or little as suits your personality. If you are mainly going to scrap from whole kits, then maybe you could get away with just tagging all of your previews for each kit. If you want to use a collection of items from your whole stash, then you will want to try to tag everything.

An idea I read in forums is to just make a "previews" folder in your files, and every kit that you donwload, copy the preview from the kit to this file. That way, when you are scrapping, you can just go to that folder and look at all the previews to see which kit you want to use. I recommend making sure that your preview name is labeled correctly with the designer name and kit name so you'll know quickly where to find it. If you are not OCD, like me, then this is probably the organizational method that I would recommend.

If you go to any of the digi forums you will likely find whole sections dedicated just to threads on organization. You may want to spend some time reading through the different methods that people use before deciding what will work best for you.