project scrap stash: i’m organized!

It’s inevitable that an issue digiscrappers come across is how to organize their stash of products. I’ve long envied those scrappers who obviously work with some kind of system of organization, and sometimes it’s evidenced by the pages they do. Cindy Schneider is one example–she has the mutant ability to pull items out of various kits and put them together into cohesive, beautiful layouts.

YEARS of starting and restarting organizing methods has only shown me how glaringly “messy” I am with my stash. Thus, I decided to finally overhaul my organizing.

Pre-project:

The problem: I keep forgetting what OTHER designers (outside of my CTs) I had in my stash and whose kits I’d bought but wasn’t using.

Two, I’d also bought various element packs that had never seen the light of day on a layout. One example is my collection of daters. I LOVE date elements. But if you look at my pages there’s nary a one used. More often than not I end up scribbling the date in a tiny font somewhere. Of course, this reality doesn’t prevent me from buying more date elements. :S I can say the same as well for brushes and stamps.

Three, my scrapping style is eclectic. I like all kinds of styles and will try various techniques on my layouts. Which means that often I get into a “mood” when I go shopping. I’ll buy a slew of bright, happy, cutesy kits, or suddenly go all vintage. I often ended up buying kits that looked similar.

Enter Project Scrap Stash. My objective is to clearly see what I have and armed with that knowledge, scrap layouts that utilize my stash and then direct my future purchases to product I actually don’t have. Bottom line, I need to find what I need when I need it, and I need to save money!

What I’ve done in the past: When I first started back in 2006, I was scrapping entirely with freebies. I broke kits apart into papers and elements. This was well and good with a stash of about 300 items, but once I started getting into CTs and actively posting in the galleries, this became cumbersome and frustrating. (At one point, I had 200 unzipped kits/element packs!)

 I’d read a LOT of reviews and tutorials on using ACDSee Photo Manager, so I started tagging my stash with it. Shortly after I started, I got really overwhelmed. I then resolved to only tag my previews.

What didn’t work: I got lazy tagging in ACDSee. :S Also, tagging using someone else’s keywords (or organizational method) got tedious and boring. I realized I wasn’t tagging according to how I think when I scrap. As a result, it would take me ages to tag a single designer’s products, even if all I tagged were the previews.

As I was beginning to think an organized stash would be nothing but a pipe dream, I listened to Episode 5 of The Digishow, where Kayla Lamoreaux guested and told of her own organization process. This class was free until the end of August.

Why I like Kayla’s system:

- I am a kit scrapper. I currently have my stash “organized” according to designer and in that folder the various products I’ve bought from them. With Kayla’s system, I can keep that structure in my EHD, and use Lightroom to access them directly in Windows Explorer. I suppose the same can be said for ACDSee, but I like LR’s interface more (it seems faster somehow, AND it doesn’t randomly crash on me). Seeing as I use LR anyhow to edit my photos, I ended up uninstalling ACDSee and saving up on RAM and harddrive space. Woot!

- Importing and tagging only my previews shrank my catalog considerably. (Kayla’s system includes converting any PNG files you have to TIF) I work on a 7-year-old PC still running on XP, so I appreciated the extra space and RAM.

PROJECT SCRAP STASH

Pre-tagging to-do’s:

- I went through my entire stash and purged what I didn’t need or hadn’t used/had no intentions of using. I whittled it down to a “modest” size of about 150GB.

- Created my “pre-nup”–basically an identical backup of how I physically organize my stash (folder-tree system in Windows Explorer with folders for each designer)

- Sat down and thought about what inspires me to scrap and scribbled a process chart for how I think when I scrap (there’s a peek of what it looks like in the photo above). Kayla says it better. I can’t stress how much this helped me when I was coming up with my own keywords (though I did take a peek at hers). When I eventually started tagging it went by quicker than when I was tagging in ACDSee, because I already knew what was important to me: having everything by designer, by color, and by theme. While I was tagging one preview at a time, I could already mentally figure out which keywords to use for each.

(click to zoom in)

My workflow: 

1. Import previews of kits, element packs, templates, etc per designer. I chose to do previews because (1) it’s far less overwhelming, and (2) I’m a kit scrapper and rarely pull stuff from other kits.

2. Delete any imports that AREN’T previews (this was the only bleh part of the project because I was doing it manually and I didn’t know how to speed up this process)

3. Keyword previews. The least I could do was keyword the designer, the color, and theme of each kit

(This is modified from Steph’s method. I adapted hers because like me, she only wanted to tag her previews and not every bit of product she owns)

My workflow as I keep downloading new product: 

- Just to keep things straight in my head, all new downloads (whether bought or used for CT assignments) go into a Tag Me! folder. This is so I know immediately what I haven’t tagged yet.

- I move these to their corresponding designer folders.

- I look for the preview of each kit/element pack and tag them accordingly.

Results so far: I’m DONE. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve tagged my entire stash of scrapbooking products and photo editing things (LR presets, photo actions, overlays, etc) I was able to finish everything in about six days, averaging about three hours a day. Considering I work on a dinosaur of a computer, this was nothing compared to the most-likely months-long process it would take me to tag everything in ACDSee.

What was so amazing for me is once I started, I was like a woman tag-possessed until I was done. Every time I sat in front of the computer I would plug in my EHD and start tagging, even if it was only a few folders at a time. Something about this whole process just got me so excited!

I’ll do another post on some other bits and pieces, like how I add in CT products, how I can search in LR, and what I’ve discovered about myself and my stash. I’m just giddy with glee that for the first time in YEARS, I’m all caught up organizing. I’m sure I’ll need to fine-tune things as I scrap, but for the most part I am thrilled with being able to actively search my stash for what I need! Thank you SO much for introducing this system, Kayla!

For more information on Kayla’s system (and she explains it SO well!) have a listen at Episode 5 of The Digishow and check out her site, where she still has her class posts up.