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It's Time for Me to Get Organized!

December 3, 2004 | 10:53 p.m. CST

I'm starting to develop a large digital photo collection, font collection, sound effects collection and vector art collection. As my media collection increases I'm finding it harder to keep everything organized. And to complicate matters even worse I work on three different computers on a regular basis. At home I have my Windows XP Professional machine with dual monitors and I also have my newly acquired 15-inch Macintosh PowerBook and then at work I have another Windows XP machine I work on.

So I thought I would seek the help of the design blog community for help to get myself organized. I want to know what kinds of applications other designers use to organize photos and fonts most of all. And additionally what applications you might use for organizing vector art and sounds effects.

I've tried a few font managers for Windows XP and wasn't that impressed. I've also played around with Photoshop CS's file manager that has the ability to add meta data to photos but I wasn't all that impressed with it either. Ideally I would like to find something that I could use on both Windows and OS X. It would also be nice if there was something that would synchronize my photo collection with my laptop so that when I'm on the road and away from my network I would have my photos to use for projects or just to show to family.

Please submit any suggestions that you have that might help me out in the comments!

Related tags: Design, Development, Web

Comments

Jeff Croft
1.   At 2:29 p.m. CST on Dec. 13, 2004, Jeff Croft wrote:

I'm not sure I have any great suggetions, but I'll sure tell you what I do:

For stock photos, sounds, and stock vector, I don't really use any particular app to organize them. I simply store them in folders, as organized as possible, and then share these directories across my network to each computer. I'd love to use a visual app for them, so I could preview them and such, but I've yet to find one that works for all media types and works really well.

Since I do most of my design work on my Mac, it's not really necessary for me to have a cross-platform font management app. I just use Apple's Font Book for Mac OS X. I don't install fonts unless I need them (if I installed all 20,000+ fonts I have, my computers would be unbearably slow). Until I install them, I just keep them in folders as with the stock images. I organize them by foundry. Because I'm a type geek, this works for me, but I suspect most people would do better organizing them by style.

For personal media (such as photos, music, etc.), I stick with iLife. iPhoto does everything I'd like for it to for my photos, and iTunes works great for music. I imagine you could adopt them for stock images and sounds too, but I've not done this.

Shawn
2.   At 5:24 p.m. CST on Dec. 13, 2004, Shawn wrote:

You might want to check out Veerle's site, as she just went through all this...

http://veerle.duoh.com/

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