Organizational Challenge: Week Nine

How was your past week? Full of fun and scrappy-ness? Hope so! How did you do with the homework?

1. Back up and Optimize Done and done- and it was a good thing. For some reason, PM was running slowly, but as soon as I optimized- whoosh! Things ran much better.
2. Continue to work on organizing brushes. Doing good on this- still not 100% done, but getting closer.
3. If you still have more time, tag your stash- Got a great Grab Bag from Jan Crowley (Queen of Quirk) and it is all tagged and put where it belongs, and is ready to be used! yay!
4. If you’d like, try out ACDSee Photo Editor 2008 here. If you haven’t downloaded this yet, you need to give it a try- I am amazed at how easy it is to scrap with- and I have made some really nice layouts with it!

And now– for this week… I have to own up to something. I made a mistake- nothing major, but I am realizing that I should have worked on my stash a bit differently, from the start. But who knew? Yes, now I know better. And now it is time for me to fix it.
When I first started tagging elements, I tagged every last one of them. If I had a ribbon pack with the same basic ribbon in 10 colors, I tagged each one as “ribbon” and by its color. In doing a category search of ribbons, all varieties of them appear. This wasn’t a big deal a year ago when I first starting using Photo Manager. I had a whole lot less stash for the program to search. But now if I did a search for “Ribbons” I have more ribbons returned that I really need to scroll through.
What I have decided to do is go back and control this excess tagging, I am going to work through my categories and un-tag the individual elements and make sure that only the preview is tagged. This is similar to what we did with the tagging of alphas. This works best with “Element Kits” rather than a full kit with papers and elements, however, you can work with this however you find it to be best for you. I think it is going to vastly reduce the wait time when I search a category with a large number of items.

Go through each set of elements that have multiples colors of the same item. This folder has every belt tagged as “Ribbon.”

I don’t think I need to have each one of these come up in a search. The kit has a great preview and that is really the only item that I feel need to be tagged. To easily do this, Select all images. Ctrl-Click the preview to deselect it, then uncheck the rest of the elements. When I do a search and I want to use an element in that preview, all you need to do is right-click and go to File, and you will be brought to the folder that has these gorgeous belts in every color!

TIP: If the folder has a few different styles of the same thing, such as Jan’s Label Freak preview:

I will tag one of each variety. This way, I will have 4 different label styles appear in a search, and all of the color variations can be found using Go To Folder.

You can find these elements by pulling up tagged categories through searching in the Organize Pane. When you find several items that are identical aside from color, click on one, right click, then Go To File. Or you can go through your Folder Tree on the left side of your screen, and browse through and see what needs to be taken care of.

Some types of categories you may with to look though may include “Frames,” “Ribbons,” “Brads,” and so on.

To recap:
Browse through your folders.
Tag preview only.
Use Go to File to find additional items.

Our Homework:
1. Back up and Optimize.
2. Go through your folders and remove “repetitive” tags.
3. 15 minutes a day to work on that stash!

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