Digital Elements Organisation - My Way!

I have been digital scrapbooking for about one year. In this time, I have gone through several different ways of organising my digital elements and how to view them. There are quite a few different ways to do it, and there are many discussions and forums on this specific topic. It has taken me many months to come up with a system that really works for me, so I thought I would share it with you, in the hopes it might help you if you are unsure of how to go about doing it.


First off, I use a MAC, so the products are a little more limited than for a Windows PC. 


For photos, I use iPhoto. It came with my MAC, I tried it, I liked it, so I kept it. I love the fact that you can sort your photos into events and view them that way, or you can view all your photos one after the other. I also love the fact that the photos come up immediately, there is no waiting for things to load.


For all my digital elements, I use Picasa. I love Picasa, I can't tell you how much I love Picasa! I am so glad they brought out a MAC version. Although the Beta version had a few problems, I persisted because it is perfect for me and my way of organising my elements. I have tried other software including Bridge, ACDSee, and Shoebox. There are probably another one or two others but they don't rate a mention. All of the other software I have tried all have good and bad points, but the biggest fault in all of them was the fact that each time you clicked on a folder, you had to wait (and sometimes wait some more) for the images to come up. I don't like waiting, I like to see what I have straight away and this is way Picasa is the one for me. 


Let me explain how I organise my elements, so you can see why Picasa works so well. I don't keep my kits all together when I buy them. I split all of my kits up into the individual element types. At first when I started doing this is was a nightmare, as most kits when you downloaded them came as kit.zip and the individual elements just said paper or brad.png with no other information. I had to find a batch renaming application so I could then rename all the files with the designers name and the kit name in each file, so I knew who designed it and what kit it came from. I use Name Mangler , and I really love it. Luckily most designers have since changed the way they name their kits and files and this isn’t so much of a problem now.


So, once all the individual elements are named to my satisfaction, I then move them in into the appropriate place in my structured file system, you can download a copy here. This is where Picasa is a head above the rest. Once Picasa is installed, it can be set up to view certain folders on the computer, and have it set to always scans those folders. This is great, so each time I add new elements to a folder, Picasa automatically updates.


Launching Picasa takes less than a minute, and all the elements in all of my folders are loaded. There is no waiting - they are all there. The other feature of Picasa that in my opinion makes it better than the rest is that you can scroll down your elements, starting from your first folder to your last folder without have to click on the individual elements folders. To open an element in PSE, I just right click and select Open With... and choose PSE. My only complaint is that only one element can be opened by PSE at a time. Maybe that will be fixed up in later versions. Fingers crossed.