So this afternoon I decided to tackle Mar’s inventory…
Oh.
My.
God.
She’s just 59 days old and already her inventory is heaving at a massive 13,334 items. This is going to require drastic measures. First of all, I’ve created some basic folders in the main Clothing folder:
Accessories, Beach, Dresses, Full outfits, Hair, Jewellery, Lingerie & socks, Pants, Shoes.
Into those I’ll pile as many clearly-labelled folders as I can. The ‘Full Outfits’ folder will take all the folders containing more than one outfit, which should do away with many of those things that would otherwise find themselves going into the ‘Miscellaneous’ section dreaded by anyone tackling a large filing job. Accessories will take things like bags, hats, hair accessories and the like.
Textures go into the texture folder. Anything to do with building goes into a special Building folder that I’ve slung into the main Objects folder. That Building folder is (so far) sub-divided into various sections: Furniture, Houses, Landscaping, Lighting, My Stuff, Tools. ‘My Stuff’ is, obviously, my own creations. Any of those useful ‘Builders Tools’ sets goes into the Tools folder, plants go into landscaping, etc etc.
Mar’s main ‘Body Parts’ folder is now sub-divided into: Avatars, Eyes, Shapes, and Skins. Likewise the ‘Animations’ folder is sub-divided into: AOs, Animations, and Poseballs.
I’ve learned a useful trick for pulling a specific folder to the top of its parent folder (and likewise a landmark to the top of the list in Map View): Start the name with an exclamation mark and several spaces (I use four). If you look at the lower level of Hell that is my Textures folder, you can see that any folder simply named ‘Sculpties’ would have been lost way below all of those huge, numbered packs (that still need to be sorted *gulp*) and I would have had to scroll like mad to find it. By putting an exclamation mark and four spaces before the name itself (! Sculpties) I’ve pulled that folder to the top of the list, which makes it much easier to find.
Finally, a plea to designers. All of us freebie hunters love you to bits for the great stuff you give us, but please, for the love of Mike (or any other person of choice) label your giveaway folders with something a little more clear than just ‘Free Gift!’ Putting the store name in the title is a good start, but when you’re fairly new you don’t yet associate certain stores with certain styles: that comes later. So a newbie might not know that ‘Free dress from Bossa Nova’ is going to be in a retro style, whereas ‘Free gift from Sn@tch’ is going to be in a punky style. (Incidentally, those two vendors are always great at naming their items: I just used them as examples of extreme opposites of the styling spectrum *g*)
OK. I’m off to brew another cup of coffee and get cracking on some more sorting. By the end of today I want nothing in the main Inventory folder. I want to get everything stashed into at least one of my smaller sub-folders. That will then break the task up into smaller pieces that I can tackle one folder at a time. If it’s Monday, it must be hair…
Edited to add: Whew! Done!
