Organize Your Pad

Welcome to Organize Your Pad, a new Blog Series at The Lilypad where we all get a little more Organized! Each month a new question or two will be posted in the forum and we want you to tell us all about how you do things. Some of the responses will be featured here on the Blog so we can all get ideas on how to make our digi lives a little more manageable.

Here were the first set of questions for you…

1. To Tag or Not to Tag? Do you do it? What do you tag (photos/kits/elements)? How do you tag? What program do you use to tag?

Tagging means to add keywords to your photos, documents or digital supplies to help you find them easier later. There are several programs around for Windows and Mac that can help you do this.

Remember this tip… If you are going to tag things, it’s important to know that the keywords you are assigning are being added to the metadata of the file. You can check your tagging program and find this out. It it applies your tag to the metadata, you can see the keywords even if you are not in the program you originally tagged it in. Which is awesome.

So, here are some great responses from The Lilypad Community.

Heather Prins:

I’m on a MAC and i use Bridge. I tag everything as soon as I unzip it. I tag it by:

designer
theme-Cameras, birthday, nature, beach, etc.
paper-solid, patterned, wood
embellishments-button, string, frame, etc.

This system works for me as I am not usually a kit user, I like to mix things up. It works especially well for Project Life.

JenEvang:

I tag ALL photos as soon as I upload them to the computer with tons of keywords. Names, places, colors, events, emotions, relationships, etc…

Then I use the rating system… 3 stars for the best photo in a series, 2 stars for “supporting pics” that are still good enough to scrap, 5 stars for my absolute favorites (I use this very sparingly).

All in Lightroom. I LOVE this b/c I can find pictures quite easily this way.

I tried to tag digi supplies once but gave up. I use Finder instead and it works pretty well. If a designer labels their stitch as “element7” instead of “stitch”, it gets lost. But enough do an excellent job at labeling (thank you, Lilypad Designers) that I can usually come up with enough options when I need something.

Trista:

I would offer a suggestion. If you want to tag digi files, start by tagging multiple like items. In windows (or finder) you can search “staple” in your digi folder for example, then select all and tag all of the staples that show up from your search in one swoop. Then later you could find stragglers and tag them separately.

JuliettePerkins:

I don’t tag photos, but I store them in folders by date and if something particularly interesting that day then I add a note to the folder name too. I keep all my stash in Picasa so I can scoot through to find things visually, I also use Picasa for tagging but at the moment I (bizarrely) only tag Washi Tape and Templates! I also have all my Lilypad stash in Lightroom so I can right click and ‘Edit In’ using Photoshop CC.

Also, Picasa has a really good facial recognition system built in, so all photos that include people are easy to find by person name in there.

LorryFach:

In Bridge I tag previews only, not individual papers and elements. I tag designer, store, kind of product (e.g. alpha, kit, 2-photo template, etc.), and theme if applicable (Christmas, family, Autumn, food, etc.) I have tags for all the BYOCs so I can find coordinating stuff easily. I also label things when I use them so I can easily find the stuff I haven’t used yet when I’m in the mood for new things.

In Lightroom, the photos are organized by date and I tag them with “to be scrapped” on import. When I scrap something, or decide it’s not going to be scrapped, I just remove the tag. I use reject/pick a lot to choose the best pics from a series. I used to tag people and places but I found I hardly ever used these tags. I mostly just want to know if it’s been scrapped already or not.

When I was on a Mac, I used Finder, and I want to mention something you can do in Finder that I think a lot of people don’t know about. You can combine different search terms and then save those searches, similar to a collection in Bridge, but cooler because there is no limit to the number of terms or the ways you can combine them. e.g. you have save a search called “The LilyPad” that searches:
“Allison Pennington” OR “Amy Martin” OR “Amy Wolff”…
Remember the quotation marks! You can also use parentheses for more complicated searches
(APennington OR “Allison Pennington”) AND (button OR brad)

mccabana:

I like to use a lot of word strips on my pages so I rename all of the word art in kits (“Great Day” instead of “designername-wordstrip8”) as soon as I get it – so it makes it easier to find words I might want to use.

AmaG:

The only thing I “tag” per se are previews. I have an abbreviation for each store and designer. Makes search super easy.

staciahall:

I tag just about everything. Supplies are tagged in ACDSee by type if I think I’ll use them again. I might tag 50% of a kit Christmas if it’s that theme. I tag repeat use items by color as well. I have an expansive category list but I do use it. My photos used to be in ACDSee too but are now in Lightroom. There I use an adapted Library of Memories system (Us, People We Love, Places We Go, etc) but have many other keywords as well. I can’t believe I didn’t go over to the Lightroom camp earlier for photos as I really love the search capabilities there.

elseepe:

I like lightroom for my photos and I tag people, my pets, and food (primarily). I tag where, especially if it was away from home. I also add captions to some photos for things I don’t want to forget. I just have folders by year.

threeunderfour:

I use iPhoto. All my photos and scrap kits go in. I import photos once a month. I unzip and import kits as soon as i get them. I tag as soon as I import. It takes me an hour max if I have tons of stuff to do.

Each kit is its own event, the preview is the Key Photo, and they are alphabetized by designer. I don’t know why that works for me but it does. Photos are organized chronologically. All kits get dragged to the top of my photostream and all photo events get dragged to the bottom.

I tag using the keyword feature. Press command k to pull up the menu. I made keywords – 1 for papers, 2 for embellishments, 3 for frames, 4 for ribbons, 5 for journaling and word art, etc… I also made keywords for each member of the family (a for Andy…) and other things like b for birthdays, c for church, x for christmas, etc. I literally press the arrow keys through each photo/kit element and add the keywords as fast as iPhoto can keep up.

Nixenkind:

I simply make little sub-files in my Windows Explorer… like, I buy a new kit and then have a file “Elements”. From that, I make little sub-files like “flowers”, “leaves”, “ribbons” and so on…
I would be lost without that, to be honest.

Whew! That’s a lot of good information and I’m thrilled to know that I’m not the only computer geek out there, hehe. Check out this thread to add your 2 cents worth and keep the conversation going.

And here are a few more kits about our favorite hobby just in case you want to scrap your tagging process. Hey, a girl’s gotta enable a little, right?