Organization Challenge: Week One

January 12th, 2009 by Chris

Photo Manager 2009 Organizational Challenge: Week One
1/12/09

Last year, I ran a 10 week organizing challenge here at DigiScrapInfo, the New Year, New Comp-U-Ter Organization Challenge.
This turned out a very positive response among the members of DSI forums. I know that it made a huge difference in helping my computer get cleaned up, and I learned a few extra things about Photo Manager at the same time.

We have a new year and a new version of Photo Manager, so I have decided to re-run the challenge. Much of the challenges will be the same or very similar to the ones that were done last year. However I will be updating the information to reflect some of the changes in the new version of Photo Manager. Most of these challenges will work just as well if you are still using Photo Manager 10, or even any of the Pro versions.

Even if you did the challenge last year, follow along and get the last year’s worth of messy files and folders cleaned, organized, backed up and streamlined.

Just as I said last year, 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. Kristi and Heidi have both posted some wonderful helpful tip and hints on the DSI Blog. One thing that I truly love about ACDSee Photo Manager is that is it so flexible so that each user can find several ways to achieve something, and can find the way that suits their needs best. I tend to be very non-techy, so I shoot straight for the most intuitive way of doing things. Heidi, being much more technologically minded, can most likely find a different way of doing things because she has a knack for seeing the “inner workings” of the software. And Kristi has wonderful and helpful tips on how to use Photo Manager and Photo Editor in connection with each other.

If you know of other ways or suggestions on how to do something being discussed, 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. It is much miuch easier to restore your database and only lose a bit of tagging, than lose your entire database.

The other thing I want to mention is that I am using Photo Manager 2009. If you have Photo Manager 9 or 10, you can follow along as well, but there may be a few things that you can’t do with them. Feel free to go to the ACDsee Website and get a free 30 day trial of Photo Manager 2009.

What we need to do first is to make sure our database is backed up and optimized. For instructions on how to back up your database, click here: Backing Up Your ACDSee Database

One thing to keep in mind is that when you are backing up your database in this way, you are backing up the tagging and organizing you are doing within Photo Manager. You are not backing up your actual images. There are better and faster ways to do this, ie burning to CD/DVD, rather than using the ACDSee Back Up Wizard. Heidi has a blog post of this, Some more things to do in 2009, Backup! I will try to discuss this more later on in these challenges.

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: Backing Up Your ACDSee Database.

I like to back up my database at least once week, although if I tag a kit or spend more than just a few minutes organizing , I will back up more often than that. Typically I will optimize my database once a week. If I move or delete a large amount of files, I will optimize afterwards.

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., 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 2009, you can Click on a zip file (Ctrl-Click for multiple files) and click on “Extract to Folder” to do the same. You can then use the folder history or browse to where you want the files to be extracted to in a snap.

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 or other destination 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.

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:

• Back Up and Optimize Database.
• Select an organizing style if you do not have one already. Once you have yours best style chosen, here are Directions to use the Organizing Style
• Decide what procedure you want to use for unzipping and tagging your digital files. Set that up.
• Spend 15 minutes a day unzipping and tagging files.