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Guest YHC

SHARE HOW YOU STAY ORGANIZED WITH YOUR ART FILES AND BUSINESS

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Guest YHC

How do you have your file structure set up on your system? Is it by numbers, alpha, style, etc? Do you use a item id/barcode format when keeping track of your sells?

Help give others ideas for a better way to run their business and stay organized. ;)

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I dont have very much but i got a toshiba 250gb portable hard drive i keep everything in folders in that. I keep it by category then by numbers. So like animals, hunting, racing then racing 1 2 3...

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I use a few broad categories for stock designs - e.g., "Professions", "Hobbies", "Politics", "Sports", "Schools".

I also keep every .fs file I cut.  I store those in this format: <year>/<month>/<customer name><00-99>.  I can always go back that way, and recut exactly what they had before --- it has already saved me many, many times ;)

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is it possible to tag files so that a search program like Google Desktop can easily find say, *.eps files named AM121.eps?  If there were a tagging system, files with names like that could be easily organized.

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I use Adobe CS4, which includes Bridge.  Since I use Flexi, it reads .ai, so i keep my files in that format.  in Adobe Bridge, you can preview all your files, and tag them with keywords to filter them by.  It's pretty dern handy.

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Guest YHC

You need a pretty strong computer to use that dont you?

I use Adobe CS4, which includes Bridge.  Since I use Flexi, it reads .ai, so i keep my files in that format.  in Adobe Bridge, you can preview all your files, and tag them with keywords to filter them by.  It's pretty dern handy.

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Since I use Flexi, it reads .ai, so i keep my files in that format.  in Adobe Bridge, you can preview all your files, and tag them with keywords to filter them by.

For Corel files, ROMCat will do the same thing.

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I have a folder named graphics.

In there I have about a dozen sub folders, such as animals, logos, vehicles, hunting/fishing, racing, tribal, etc.....

Then, my graphics are numbered from there.

That way, when someone orders from the catalog, they can tell me animal #27 and there's no problem.

I also have a folder for t-shirt sayings, they just tell me the number of the t-shirt saying.

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You need a pretty strong computer to use that dont you?

Not really.  The machine it runs on is a single core AMD 2600+ with 2gb of ram.  I do most of my design work on a MBP, but the PC is very much capable of it all.

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I've been using IrfanView w/GhostScript to view all of my *.eps files as thumbnails and then dragging and dropping into sub-folders very similar to what Mac is doing.  Once I finish, it'll be a breeze to maintain it from there on out.

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All my clipart is in categories as the others.

All my custom work is in customer folders by last name, then each design they have is a subfolder under that.

All my website designs are done by name...wondering as I grow if I shouldn't go sort them by the SKU they are given in my system...that woulda probably been smarter.

All files are on a primary hard drive in computer, on an external, and backed up to an online backup service. 

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I save everything to a folder called "desktop" then i search from there.... ;)

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Guest YHC

I save everything to a folder called "desktop" then i search from there.... ;)

;) That sucks!  :)

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ive got 27,000 eps files we just look and look and look. scratch head and do again

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tlzimmerman, what program are you using that assigns a sku for a website?

Virtuemart plugin for Joomla, and sku is a number I pick when creating the item on the site, and not a barcode.

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Guest YHC

Can you Zip file that and send it to me?  :thumbsup::huh:

ive got 27,000 eps files we just look and look and look. scratch head and do again

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folders with names like hunting, cars, etc - some of the collections I bought are the hardest to find stuff in because they don't categorize like that and finding something among 100,000 is a little difficult

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