Organization - A must for the digi scrapper :D

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is about organization. I will now try to welcome you into the world of the neuritic. Just remember that you asked for it.

My organization is really simple - I organize all my images by date. When I burn them to a DVD, I write down where and what we did. For me staying organized means being able to get what I want quickly - not having my computer slow me down because I have everything and the kitchen sink on it :D

I shoot Raw Files and they are - in the word of Will Ferrel in Elf - ginormous! So - to accommodate my large file I have 2 hard drives on my computer. My C drive is where my working programs are, for example Photoshop, Word, and Lightroom. My D drive is where stuff that I am currently editing is located and scraping materials that I am currently "in love with". I have two external hard drives and one is for storage of all my scraping materials and the other is for everything from a paper on The Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption and USPTO stuff to images that have not been burned to a DVD (I now burn DVD's instead of CD's because of my file size) External Drive #2 is all my scraping supplies and that is the only thing that goes on that external. I also have all my images backed up on DVD's by the month and year. Once they are on DVD and I delete them from my external and internal drives. It works for me. I also want to encourage you to delete the compressed file that you receive for the shops where you buys your supplies - once you extract the file there is no reason to really keep the zip file. I burn them to a DVD as a back up and then they are gone.

As for my scraping materials - I have a three ring binder and I print out the contact sheets that come with most kits. I print them in color and then place them in the binder by designer and boutique. I do this so that when I am away and I want to prep a layout - I can pull out my three ring binder and work. Also - this is a great source when I am looking for an embellishment and I know that the one I want is by Syndee Nuckles from Scrap Girls - just as an example. I can start there and find what I want. It beats going through the hundreds of files I have accumulated in a short time since I started digi scraping.

For most folk I suggest two external drives. One for images and another for your scraping materials. I go back and forth between my laptop and desktop, so having two externals makes it easy to keep working. Also - Sending your scrapping materials to an external hard drive will keep your computer "clean" and working at optimal speed.

One more tip - I have a file for Prince Charming's Scrapbook and another file for Princess-in-Training's book. If you were to open that file you would see a file for each month in 2008. I save all my LO's in these files. Once I am sure that a file is perfect and I am not going to do anything else to it - I delete the PSD file. I only save and burn to DVD's the jpg. flies. Once a month I burn to the DVD the image and a slide show set to music.

Oh - BTW - I de-frag everyday - my computer is set up to do it automatically - this is just good maintenance :D

So that is how I stay organized ~ did it help? If you have a tip to share on how you stay organized - leave a comment and share it with everyone :D