HOW do you organize your digital scrapbook elements/paper downloads?

[disneyfan2]

So i am new to using photoshop but had the suggestion to download freebies. I started at one site, which lead to another with freebies, that lead to another and so on and so on.....

Now i initially saved everything based on who's site i downloaded from but now i have soooo much stuff, paper elements kits saved that when i even think of starting it is too overwhelmeing

What organizational tips can you offer, should i create folders with individual papers or themes, or separate elements etc.. there is so much i don't even want to start, but i have a photoshop elements book that i want to use to learn the program,.. Maybe i will call it a night

 

[Fran98765]

I have found that organizing by Site and Designer and kit works best for me. In the first level of folders I have the major scrapping sites, under each I have the designers from each site and then I sort by kit name.

So my directory looks something like this:
3 Scrapateers
...Bannerwoman
......kit a
......kit b
...Carla Ware
......kit a
Digitals
...Bannerwoman
......kit a
...CHRIS BEASLEY!
......kit a

and so forth. I find a lot of single blogs, for designers that aren't with a major site, or I don't know where they are from, so I also have a Blog designer folder with the scrapbook sites.

I have tried other ways before (by type of files) and found this works best for me. This makes it easy to give credit on your work. The only down side to my system is when someone like Bannerwoman (above) sells at more then one site and you have to look between the different sites to make sure you don't have dupes and so forth.

I participate in many challenges on various sites and usually try to use that site's products for their challenges. Some sites require you to, but I try to most of the time anyway and having this system makes it very easy to do that.

Hope this helps you out a bit!

 

[beasleybear]

I...CHRIS BEASLEY!
......kit a

LOL, thanks for the all-caps shout out!

I'm very disorganized, so I am not really any help with this question. If I WAS organized, I'd probably have all my papers tagged in Organizer by designer and item type (paper, embellishment). Currently all my items by other designers are on a disk instead of my hard drive, but when they were on my hard drive, I would create a folder for each store and then just browse through the folders when I was looking for something.