Scrapbook Saturday #7- Organization Part 2

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Last week, we talked about organizing our photo stash. Today, I’d like to share one way for organizing your digital scrapbooking stash.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t anything new, and I’m even positive that I got the idea from a Scrap Girls tutorial for beginning digiscrappers. But since this was the first method I used to organize my stash, I’d like to share it with everyone tonight. 🙂

There are two key assumptions to this method though:

  1. The designers name and package their files/kits with a certain way that includes the designer name/initials, and the kit name.
  2. That you organize your stash as soon as you download and unzip.

Now, because not all kits I downloaded conformed to assumption #1, and I didn’t always unzip the same day I download, I admit that this method proved to be quite tedious and took away from actual scrapping time.

Despite that, I still believe that it could be a great way to organize stuff. In fact, when I got down to do some actual scrapping, it was actually not that difficult to shop around my own stash and find things that would go well with my layout.

So what to do?

Set up your folder structure. Yes. This means that you need to prepare the folders in your hard drive in which you’ll be dumping stuff after you unzip. I’ve got a sample here:

I created a new folder inside My Documents, and labeled it SCRAP. Of course you can create your own folder elsewhere in your hard drive if you want. My real stash is actually in a secondary HD, and the folder name is Digi Scrap Store (because I think of my shop as a big store!).

Inside the SCRAP folder, I created FIVE basic subfolders that you can see in the screen shot: BACKGROUNDS – or Papers, ELEMENTS, FRAMES, PREVIEWS, and TOUs (Terms of Use).

The next level of folders is where the fun begins. You can have as many sub-folders that you can think of within the five basic ones mentioned above.

For BACKGROUNDS, you may have subfolders per COLOR or HUE. At home, I have a PINK-RED, BLUE-VIOLET, EARTH-BROWN, GREEN, YELLOW-ORANGE subfolders. I did have a separate folder for THEMED PAPERS though. That’s where papers for specific occasions would go (halloween, Christmas, etc.).

The same subfolders of color and hue follow for my ELEMENTS folder. Within each folder for a color, would be even more subfolders for the many types of elements/embellishments that exist! For example:

 Coming up with categories for your elements can be fun, but also sometimes confusing. Haha. Aside from these three, I have GLITTER, DOODLES, JOURNALLING MATS, and many others I can’t particularly remember right now!

With this particular method, it is quite easy to find papers and elements that would match the colors of the photos you are scrapping.

One thing that was a challenge though, is the fact that, going back to assumption #1, not all designers would put their name and the kit name in the file name for each paper and element in the pack. So, after unzipping, you would need to find time to rename everything to include the information. Of course, when I started organizing stuff, I wasn’t very diligent yet. So what happened was, I would use a paper or an element, and have a tough time identifying who made it or from what site/kit I took it from.

Next week, I’ll share another organization tip with you all.

In the meantime, don’t forget to visit the rest of the participants to Scrapbook Saturday. Start with this week’s host at Nothing but Purple.

I hope you find this post useful 🙂