Embroidery design organization
 

I am really enjoying all of my designs and am in the middle of organizimg them. What folder names do you use?

Here is a free design organizer that comes to you zipped but is loaded with folders already named for categories. And you can customize by changing the folder names. It was still available for download this morning, so have a look. http://www.spoolsstash.com/

I use folder names such as animals, Christmas, frames, alphabets, etc. Of course, some folders have sub folders, like alphabets - there are tons of free alphas out there. Sometimes I use the name of the store where I bought the designs, such as Embroidery Library or Urban Threads, as the main folder name. My biggest problem when I need to embroider is deciding which design to use! :p

When I started embroidering I asked my dealer about this. She said after 6yrs she's still changing how she does things but one thing she told me makes so much since so I do this. When I get a design and go to download it I creat a folder called Judy's orders and then a folders called orders_companys name, I have one for each place that I get a design from. I download the design and leave it with the same name it came with. Then I take the designs and save them to folders/sub folders for what they are, beach, cutwork, kitchen, holidays w/sub folders for each holiday, etc. When I save them to these folders I name them so it's easy to tell what they are. The reason for this is two things; first I only need to backup the orders folders and the folders where I create or modify designs to make them my own. Short and sweet to do. Secondly and most important. Most sites will allow you to download designs more than once but every once in a while the retire some of thier designs and unless you know the orginal name/number of the design there is no way to get that design back. Plus by having the orders in different folders it's easy to know which site I got them from because I'd never remember after that. If you want some folders to be at the top of the list then put a 1, etc after them. I wanted my creations and orders to be first so I have 1Judys Designs, 2Orders, etc. It'll probably take a while of reading different techniques for you to fine tune yours so be patient. I think the more I get the more I change how I do them.

I know there is no way for me to remember what all I have so I'm in the process of taking all of my designs and creating jpegs and saving them into folders w/site names and when I'm done I'm going to print small thumbnails of each so that I can go thru it when looking for a design. Hope this all helps.

I store my designs on an external drive to start. I then have categories such at: Alphabet, Children, Flowers, Holidays, Animals, Nature, Quilting, Patriotic, Food, etc...

Then I have subfolders ie. Holidays Folder with Christmas, Valentine, St Patrick, Halloween, Mother's Day, Father's Day, etc...
It seems to work for me Sometimes I have subfolders under the subfolders, such as Christmas I may have Stocking, Trees, Stars, Ornaments, FSL Ornaments, Santa.

I forgot to add that when I download the designs I also indicate where I obtained so that I can give credit where credit is due. I also download their copyright information as some designs you embroidery you can sell and some you can't or they are limited on the number of objects you can sell.