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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Template Projects in ACDSee Photo Editor 2008

Last Monday ACDSee launched their newest product for digital scrapbookers & crafters. ACDSee Photo Editor 2008 is a user friendly software that offers many great features. You can try the beta until July! We have a list of the new features & how to videos

We decided to include some templates by well-known designers to help everyone get started.

Andrea Gold is a designer from Go Digital Scrapbooking. She’s well known for her templates!

She created designs for scrapbooking pages in a number of sizes and some are landscape also.

She also created some fun craft related templates such as a calender grid that can be personalized and candy bar wrappers for those special occasions.

Maggie LaMarre owns Dragonflaire Studios and is an awesome hybrid scrapbooker & card maker!

She created four cards for us. Here are a couple of them completed in her amazing style.

We hope the templates will motivate you to get creative!

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my search for some cool waterdrop photos

So totally off topic but sometimes you need that…

I love waterdrop photos but am photography challenged so I had no hopes of taking my own water drop photos for artwork on my walls. I started searching at typical places like art.com but didn’t find any waterdrop pictures or art that I liked. So I started cruising the internet and found all kinds of waterdrop photos in the photo internet galleries (flickr, smugmug, and pbase.) At PBase.com I found a user, brian59, who had some really cool waterdrop photos. Here’s his gallery: brian59 Water Drop Gallery I contacted him and asked how I could get a print of his images. We came to agreement and I received 4 prints from mpix.com I made my favorite image into a 16 x 20 and the other 3 are 8 x 10 and they were all printed on metallic paper. They turned out gorgeous. I did a simple framing of plastic box frames. I wanted them to appear as if they are floating on the wall with no frames.

Here is my favorite photo linked from Brian’s gallery.

I have yet to hang them up on the wall because the wall still needs to be painted. Sigh.. I am putting these in the bathroom my husband and I finished in our downstairs. The 16 x 20 is going over the whirlpool tub between 2 sconces. The other 3 will be on the wall next to the sink. But here is the photo of them grouped together. (Unfortunately the box frames are reflecting my reflection but it gives you an idea.)

Isn’t the internet cool?? I went in search of waterdrop photos and I found the ones I love and was able to get them.

And it was ironic, the day I opened the box and pulled out the prints and showed them to my kids, my son said at school his class was just talking about water & waterdrops and this shows exactly what they were talking about.

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