Digital Organization

So sorry for your frustration! I'm afraid I will not be much help here as I still just use folders to organize my stash. I keep folders by designer and then break them down further into sub-folders for templates/kits/brushes/etc. as needed. I'll be watching this thread though, interested to see what others do. As my stash grows I am finding it more difficult to put my hands on things - especially when mixing products.

 

i'm the same as Ashley, I'm afraid; I've never used ACDSee; at one stage i used Picasa but i believe that is gone now.
I do however pin all my previews to a private board on pinterest so if i'm looking for, say, a yellow button, i'll scroll thru til i find yellow-ish kits and it reduces the amount of folder-opening, pointless searching (I know about recolouring but that's just an example of how i use the preview board). I just pin from the store during the download process so it's not a lot of extra steps; i have a separate board for templates (which i used to sort by number of photo spots but hated splitting packs) - piterest has made that search for the right template a lot easier too.

 

I am a compulsive organizer and am using ACDSee but that doesn't seem to be an option for you anymore. I used to use Lightroom and loved it, but my PC was not powerful enough to handle my supplies at the same time as Photoshop and all the other stuff I have open at the same time.
If you have LR and your machine has sufficient capacity you might want to try it. You have to import stuff as an extra step but the organizing capabilities of LR are endless.

 

Also, a lot of people will use LR for the photos and Bridge for their digi supplies. I know there are lots of topics on using Bridge to organize. It's free if you have Photoshop. If you are interested, I would google switching from ACDSee to Bridge for digital scrapbooking ... and see what articles come up. Try googling Bridge here in the forum too. This comes up once in awhile here as well. I think someone recently mentioned it but can't remember who.

I used to use Bridge to "see" things - but I have never been an organized digi scrapper who tags. I just can't keep up w/it, don't have the patience for it/it's not me. Lately I use my Finder window and Macs's native search engine - it's not perfect but I know I will never be a "tagger" of products. But there are a lot of options built in to Bridge to help you tag, create smart collections, etc. Might be worth your while if you are already a Photoshop user? Good Luck - I feel for you!

 

Years ago I (a total Mac user for 15+ years) won a copy of ACDSee and waited til they had the Mac version to get my gift. I liked it a lot but found that the company did not really support Mac users. I switched to Lightroom (version 5) and have used that every since to have all my digi supplies in a Digi Catalog. I actually made a catalog just for TLP last year so I could find supples from this store more easily. Now I'm using LR CC and it works just fine since my supplies are on a 2T EHD and easily accessed from my iMac. I almost love LR as much as my iMac!

As opposed to @jenn above whose name keeps defaulting to macabre... I AM a tagger/keyworder but find I need to do it less when I am more used to my supplies which are well organized.

 

I've been using an iMac for 6 years and digiscrapping for over a decade and I find what I need just fine using the regular folders in Finder and the search function. I mix and match kits all the time.

 

I use this same organization for my stash. Folder for store, then by designer then by product.

Ditto this so much, except I'm Windows and I use the native search functions and find what I need pretty well. Most designers use the (designer initials)_(kitname)_(elementdescrip) format and that usually finds what I need. I also find that if I keep my stash organized, I usually don't have to search too hard to find something.

 

I have been an ACDSee user for yearrrrs! LOVED it on my PC, and then stuck with it when I went Mac (even though it didn't seem to operate as well). Lately ACDSee has been running super sloooooow so I downloaded ACDSee Photo Studio Mac Beta, but haven't yet installed it. Don't think I'm gonna now. Thinking I'll wait until they fix the bugs (if they ever do!).

Other than ACDSee I don't know what to recommend. When ACDSee started bogging down I tried Bridge, but it didn't have the tagging control that I was accustomed to with ACDSee so gave up on it super quick.

I think I might take a look at LR and see how I feel about it. ACDSee is going to be hard to beat. Seriously. You just can't beat the tagging capabilities that it has.

Sorry I wasn't more help. Let me know if you find anything, I'd be willing to try something else. Until then, I'll probably just stick with my super sloooooow ACDSee Mac Pro (unless LR actually pans out).

 

I really don't think you need a program if you have a MAC. I keep my stash in Finder. A folder for kits and a folder for templates. Inside those folders are more folders for each kit, alphas, templates., etc. I keep it all in ABC order according to designer and/or store.

I don't tag things, either, because I can do a Spotlight search for just about anything. If the designers name the items appropriately, they all appear when I search. I can search by item, color, jpg or png file, flower, button, string, etc.

 

You won't be disappointed with LR as far as tagging. I love ACDSee but LR beats it in my opinion.

 

Are you absolutely positive you can't retrieve your tags? If the data has been embedded in your files, you should be able retrieve them by recataloging. I had to do this once, by going to tools, database, catalog files. Then you need to pick a small section of your files, say one designer/store and catalog just those files, then go onto the next one. Its a bit slow, but ACDSee locks up if you try to get them back all at once. I'm using ACDSee for the PC so I'm not sure if the Mac version works the same, but possibly worth a try.

 

I have all my supplies and photos on an EHD, then my most used ones on a 128 GB flash drive all organized in folders. I've always wanted to try Lightroom and creative cloud, but my scrapping is so intermittent that I can't commit to $10 a month when sometimes I go 2-3 months without scrapping.

I've heard good things about lightroom though.

 

I'm a Mac user. I have all my goods stored on my drive. I have everything organized into thematic folders. (i.e. Spring, Cats, Everyday, Movies, Books...) And I have my generic stuff organized by type (i.e. Frames, Masks and Overlays, Templates, Stamps, Paint, Embellishments). I use Mac's colour coded tags. Everything I haven't used before is tagged purple (I feel an intense need to try and use nearly everything I've got at least once). Little things I might pull from kit to kit are tagged differently. Fasteners are tagged blue, stitching is yellow, thread and string is green. As I use items, I take off the purple tag. When I've used everything in one folder, I take the purple off the folder. (And somehow that brings me a lot of contentment).

If I'm working on something and am looking for paper or an element to match a theme, I got to that theme's folder. If I need a frame, I got to the frame folder. If I am looking for the right bit of stitching to stitch down a word bit, I search using the green tag.

 

Is the tagging the same/similar to ACDSee? Based on what I've read in this thread, my tagging is quite different than what everyone else is doing, I think. LOL! I have 3 designers that I use all the time so they each have their own folder and are tagged independently from everyone/everything else. I have a folder for The Lilypad with all the various designers inside and they're all tagged as a group, and then everyone outside of The Lilypad is lumped together in another folder and tagged. I tag everything according to what it is ... alphas (this is broken down into uppercase, lowercase, numbers, et al), papers (broken down by color), flowers, fasteners, etc. etc. When I'm looking to use flowers on my layout I simply select flowers and everything comes up, etc. etc. Does that all make sense?

Does LR work that way?

 

Yes, LR works that way.

You can also create smart collections. So, lets say, you tag Designer A, B, and C and want one collection that shows everything by all three. You could create a Smart Collection that will auto update anytime you add that tag to a kit.

You can also narrow down. I use it for photos currently (adding digi supplies catalog is on my never ending to do list). I can pick the tag "me" and also "Boston" and will only see the photos that match both those tags. So you could narrow down from flowers to yellow flowers if you tagged by color and item.

 

@Katherine B LR has tons of possibilities to tag and search in many combinations. When I started using ACDSee I was disappointed because it is way less flexible - but I have come to manage ok.

Like Courtney say, smart collections are awesome as they auto update, but there are other collections, tags (keywords) and what not. And as replacement for the basket (not sure what it is called in English, my version isn't in English) one could use for example a quick collection.

It really is more convenient than ACDSee if your PC can handle such a big catalog (mine couldn't).

 

@bestcee @Rikki ... Do you actually pull everything into LR? Or can you house everything on an EHD and simply have LR "point" to it? Right now I have an EHD where everything is stored, and when I open ACDSee it opens to the folder on my EHD that houses my digital supplies. Is LR like that?

 

Lightroom is a viewer, not a storer. So, everything remains where it is, unless you specifically tell LR to move the file.

@Katherine B

 

I'm sorry to say there are lots of products that have names that tell you nothing about the product/element. I'm looking at some of the items in the current MPM that are like this.