Organizational Challenge: Week One

It was wonderful, albeit somewhat surprising to me, that so many of you are up for this challenge. It’s very exciting!
Before I start , I want to make a disclaimer that what I am describing here is only my way of doing things. There maybe other and/or easier ways to do this. If you know of such a way, by all means, share it with us! The other point I cannot stress enough is back up your database often. I tend to back my database up every time I spend more than just a few minutes of tagging. So feel free to explore with this program, but make sure you back up, just in case things get funky on you.
The other thing I want to mention is that I am using Photo Manager 10. If you have Photo Manager 9, you can follow along as well, but there may be a few things that you can’t do in 9. Feel free to go to DigiScrapInfo.com and get a free 30 day trial of Photo Manager 10.

What I want to do first is to make sure my database is backed up and optimized. For instructions on how to back up your database, click here: Backing Up your Database

TIP: Either take a look at the location of the back up, take a screen shot, or write down the location. We’ll need this information in a later post.

After you are backed up, we are going to optimize your database. This will help Photo Manager run more smoothly and quickly. For instructions you can read here: Optimize your Database

Once we have this completed, we need to think about how we organize. We need to come up with a consistent way to to do this. Consistency is the key to organization, in real life, parenting, housekeeping and yes, in digi-scrapping. I find it hard to stay consistent on occasion (more frequently in the parenting situations, ack!!), but I really notice a huge difference when I stay focused and keep a good routine.

The first part of this is to pick a Organizing Style. You can use the default one in Photo Manager, you can choose one of the ones provided by other ACDSee users, or use one of your own. Now this is important since it is easy to look at the styles shown and get overwhelmed. No need for that, at all! First, any categories you start with can be edited, deleted, combined, or new ones can be added. The amazing thing with Photo Manager is that you can really customize it to make it work best for you. I would bet that out of 100 ACDSee users, no two set-ups would be exactly alike. And that brings me to my second point; Feel free to make this program “yours.” Perhaps you know you’ll never use plaid paper (too many years in Catholic school perhaps *wink* ). Then there is no need to have a category or subcategory for Plaid Paper. On the other hand, perhaps you are a Doodle-A-Holic. You have doodle hearts, doodle borders, doodle swirls, fancy doodles, kid doodles– you get the picture. (I see some of you smiling - you can relate, right!?) . In that case you might like to break doodles down into subcategories.

TIP: In my experience, it is better to start with the basic categories at the start and create subcategories later on, as you see the need for them. I find that too many options, starting out, can get overwhelming.

The last thing I want to cover before we get busy tagging is to come up with a consistent routine (There that word again! LOL) for downloading, unzipping, tagging and moving new files. We all know it, we love to get new digital goodies and in our excitement to see what we got, we have zip files scattered all over our hard drive(s). Photo Manager 10 is wonderful because you can Extract right in the program. In PM 9, you can Right Click on a zip file and click on “Shell Open” to do the same. In PM 10, you can select multiple zip folders to open at once which is a neat time saver.

TIP: I recommend only unzipping a few folders at a time. Every once in a while, a designer doesn’t pack the individual files into a “inner” folder and if you have too many loose files, it can get crazy trying to round them all up. Think of a 3 year old birthday party, after the cake….

Back to the routine of this- yes, it makes tagging so much easier if you know where all of your files are. What I have done is set up a folder _To Be Tagged. The underscore puts the folder near the top of my “tree.” When I download a file, I put it in this folder *every time.* And that zip will stay there until I can get around to unzipping it. When I am ready to unzip and tag, I select the zip file (Ctrl-Click to select multiple files), then click on Extract to Folder.

Make sure that your _To Be Tagged Folder is selected. Click OK.

After my files are extracted, I move my Zip file into a sub folder, called appropriately “Zips.” (I am so creative!) I like to hang onto my zips for a while, to make sure there were no corrupted files or I don’t accidentally delete something. Then I have unzipped files in its own folder, all ready to be tagged.

TIP: This is important! Once you tag your files, you should only move them within Photo Manager. If you move files outside of Photo Manager, you will lose the information tagged to that file.

Alternatively, there is a description of another way to do this on the DSI Blog. Again, there is no one right way to do this. I am simply sharing ideas that you can use as is, or modify as you see fit.

OK- we could go on and on about how to best tag and organize your files, but if I tell you all that now, you won’t come back and read this next week

Here is the Challenge for Week One, and yes, I am going to be doing each of these too. If you need any help, just post a question at the DigiScrapInfo Forum, and I’ll do what I can to help. And if any of you have helpful hints or tips, please feel free to share.

Week One Tasks:

1. Back Up and Optimize Database.
2. Select an organizing style if you do not have one already. Directions to use the Organizing Style
3. Decide what procedure you want to use for unzipping and tagging your digital files. Set that up.
4. Spend 15 minutes a day unzipping and tagging files.

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