Digital organization

So far the best way I've come up with is to keep the kits together and arrange them under themes such as "Winter." "Christmas," "Heritage," "Romance," etc. Before I started that I lost the terms of use and the people to credit.

I also have one folder that I call "Favorite Kits." I have to really love it to put it here so it doesn't get too crowded.

If you have lightroom, you can add keywords to your elements, such as "buttons," "bows" "bright" "multicolored," "tone on tone (used mostly for papers). You can keyword in Adobe bridge or I think PSE has an organizer. But if you keyword PNG files, the words have to have what they call a sidecar to keep the keywords. I forget what the extension is.

I like lightroom best because I find it easiest to find what I'm looking for. Colors are put under a Color folder, designs, such as plaid, stripes, dots, floral, etc go under a design folder so it keeps them together making it easier to add keywords.

I have about three thousand large and tiny kits so it's going to take a long time to keyword them all! So I often use Windows explorer file manager because it has a search feature. I can go to my main "Scrapbook kits" folder, highlight it, and type what I want into the box. A lot of kits already have what you are looking for in their name: such as "button" "tag" etc.. Explorer pulls those up and I can use the preview box to run down the list. It misses the ones that don't have the identifier in the name. (Sometimes I rename a file and add an identifier.) When I find what I like, Left click (I think it's a left click) and a menu will offer a number of options including opening the containing folder up. Then I have the piece and the whole kit to match.

I hope this isn't too hard to follow!