Organization Challenge Week Four

February 9th, 2009 by Chris

2/9/2009
How did everyone do with cleaning up all of those Duplicate Authors? I found quite a few that needed some work on them. One thing I would like to see in a future version of Photo Manager would be a Auto-Fill In for the Author, like they do for keywords. But for now, a little pruning here and there doesn’t hurt too much.
Did all of you remember to Back up and Optimize? I did both. In fact, I think I backed up about three times. I have been doing a lot of work on creating and updating Photo Disks and I don’t want to lose any of that hard work. And keep reading every week, because soon I am going to have a Challenge on clearing up hard drive space by making Photo Disks.
If you and your database are ready go, let’s move on to this week!

Today, we will be working on a task that I did last year, but am dreading at having to do it again.  Organizing Fonts. I am a self-admitted Font-a-holic. I collect fonts like some people collect…. shoes. And they can make a mess of your computer- both in how it runs and on your organization if you don’t have a good system to work with.
I want to remind everyone of my disclaimer that I stated the first week of this challenge. This is only my way of doing things. It works for me; however, it might not work for you . And that is 100% OK. If you have a different way to do any of, and would like to share, you can post in the DigiScrapInfo Forum.

I do not keep many of my fonts installed on my computer. I really like to collect fonts and I have a lot- at least a few thousands. Keeping them all installed makes my computer extremely angry with me. The system I have devised is to keep most of my fun fonts onto my second hard drive.  You may choose to do this in a separate folder, on an external hard drive or on a different drive. All of my scrapping supplies are on my second hard drive so that is where I keep my fonts.
So first, what I did is figure out which fonts had to stay installed.

TIP: For a list of Windows Fonts that should not be uninstalled, read this post .

Second, I needed to choose a few fonts that I use all of the time, is several different programs to keep installed. These are the ones that would be more inconvenient to had uninstalled than installed. I chose a couple of script, and a couple of handwriting style fonts that I really consider as my favorites. Now that I am looking back since last year, I know I want to change mine a bit. As all Font-a-holics know, your favorite fonts can change rapidly. Today I am going to go back through my list of “non-essential fonts” and choose the ones I want to keep, and uninstall the ones I don’t want at the moment. What is nice about this method, is that if I want that font, I can use Photo Manager to temporarily load certain fonts just for when I need them.
The rest of the fonts are then uninstalled. Some people use The Font Thing (TFT), which is what I had used for my font browsing before Photo Manager. Once I was done with TFT, I uninstalled it as there was no need for it any more. But if you have it, or need to use it, you can download and uninstall it when you are done.

TIP: You can find The Font Thing here.

I have found that I like to keep my Fonts in Sub-Folders in different Categories rather than having them in one folder and being tagged. Feel free to try it this way or by tagging and see which one makes more sense to you.
What I did next was create a folder tree in Photo Manager for my fonts.  On my second hard drive, where I have all of my scrap supplies, I created a folder called Ta-da! …. Fonts.
Under that, I made new folders for the different style fonts I use. Here you can see how my folders are set up in Photo Manager.

You can make as few or as many folder as you wish. It all depends on how many and what style fonts you have.
TIP: If you need ideas for font styles dafont.com has a very good list of font styles.

From there, I dragged all of my uninstalled fonts from where they originally were located, right on into the new Fonts folder. From there, I just scrolled on down, Ctrl-Clicked similar fonts and then dragged them into the appropriate folder.
To use these fonts when scrapping is really easy, even though they are not installed. Before you open your editing program, open Photo Manager, select the fonts you wish to use, then go to Database  | Rebuild Thumbnails and Metadata.

Open your editing program. When you are ready to work with the fonts, simply drag them from Photo Manager into the program. The fonts will be loaded onto your computer only while your editing program is open. When you close it, the fonts automatically unload.
For more details you can read here:

Using Uninstalled Fonts

Using Fonts

Change the Sample Text of Fonts

The other thing we are going to  work on this week is to remove extra back ups that are stored on your hard drive. ACDSee does not overwrite the back up data, it makes a new folder each time you back up. So  if you back up a lot,. which is a very good idea, you may have a lot of back-ups on your hard drive that are taking up precious storage space.

To do this in Version 9, the default location is:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\90\ACDSeeBK

For Version 10, the default location is:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\100\ACDSeeBK

To do this in Version 2009 (11), the default location is:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local Settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\110\ACDSeeBK

My Database is located on my EHD that floats between my laptop and my desktop. I wanted the Database to be accessible for both systems, so it is I:ACDSeeDatabase\ACDSeeBK

For a full explanation on how to see how many back ups you have, click here http://digiscrapinfo.com/wordpress/2007/11/16/you-can-learn-from-my-mistake/
Tasks for Week 4:
1. Back up and Optimize
2. If you use Photo Manager to view fonts, set up a system to keep you better organized.
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!
4. If you have any credit information on these fonts, go ahead and put that information in the Caption or Notes section.
5. Check to see how many back- up files you have and delete as many as you feel comfortable.