Organizational Challenge: Week Six

Perhaps I should call this Week 5-A. Or Week 5 Redo? Either way, I am reporting on my tasks that I assigned to myself on Week Four.Tasks for Week 4/5:
1. Back up and Optimize– Done! This one is easy. Has it become a natural habit for you as well?
2. If you use Photo Manager to view fonts, set up a system to keep you better organized. This was mostly done prior to this week, but I was able to work on getting some neater categories. I found the hardest part was deciding what fonts went into which folder.
3. If you find fonts that you know you will never use, have duplicate fonts or corrupted fonts, delete them and don’t look back! Whew! I really had a hard time, but I did find some that I was able to delete. It felt good- kind of like when you toss all of those “single” socks. and now I don’t have to look at them anymore!
4. If you have any credit information on these fonts, go ahead and put that information in the Caption or Notes section.

TIP: Try to get into the habit of doing this as soon as you download a font. Unfortunately, I has many credit files floating around, but I don’t know what fonts belong to them. It is going to take some hard detective work to figure this all out.

5. Check to see how many back-up files you have and delete as many as you feel comfortable. Done!

Ok- so it took me an extra week, but what is most important is that we don’t give up. Better to take an extra week to catch up than stop organizing completely and then fall way behind.
So are we ready to move on? I am!
I am glad that I am doing this as a “real” person- like all of you are. I’m a working mom with outside situations that take over a bit. Life isn’t perfect, life is busy and hectic- life throws us a lot of curves. This series in organizing it helping me- and hopefully you- to realize that it is easier to work around the craziness and accept it is for what it is.
Now who would have thought ACDSee and scrapping could be so Zen?
I had two separate tasks that I wanted to work on this week, one is a bit more complicated and time consuming than the other. I had planned to clean up our Alpha Files, and to begin organizing our Brushes. I am getting 4 impacted wisdom teeth removed on Tuesday and I think that trying to accomplish both goals in one week is biting off more than I can chew- no pun intended!
So let’s focus on our Alphas, and next week we can focus on the brushes. No stress allowed!

One thing that I did when I first started out with Photo Manager was to tag all of my Alpha files as “Alphas.” When I only had a few alpha sets, t was no big deal. but now- a year later, I really don’t need to see every letter of every alpha when I search for them using the Organize Pane.

To find everything that is tagged alpha, go to your Organize Pane, select the category Alpha. If you have sub-folders, you should also include them as well. To do this, go to the top of the Organize Pane, click on Match Any/All and select the Include Sub-Categories. If it is grayed out, you’ll need to select Alpha first.

When you have all of your alphas showing, scroll through the thumbnails. When you come to an alpha that is showing all of the letter files, right click on one of them and select Go To File. This brings you to the folder where they are located. Select All (Ctrl-A) and deselect the “A” file. (Ctrl-Click).
Go to the Properties pane, and uncheck the tags you had for them. This leaves just the “A” file with any alpha tags associated with it. To back to the previous window, click the Back button on the top left of your screen. F5 will refresh the screen.

TIP: Some Alphas have numbers. If this is the case, deselect the “A” File and one of the number files, I use the “1″ file.

Some scrappers prefer to have a preview or contact sheet for their alphas.That is easy enough to do with Photo Manager: Creating your own preview with ACDSee Photo Manager

Another way to help with searching for alphas is to have them tagged into styles/sub-categories. This image shows the sub-categories I have for my alphas:

You can obviously add in however many sub-categories as you want and need.
For DigiscrapInfo’s Tutorial on Organizing Alphas, read here.
Our Homework for this week is this:

1. Back up and Optimize
2. Clean up alphas- so that only one letter or contact sheet/preview comes up in a search
3. Create sub-categories and tag Alphas

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