I've been struggling with this for years. I've collected several gigabytes of clipart and icons. Many of these are vector formats (ai, eps) so they are not viewable as thumbnails in pretty much any program out there, excluding Adobe Bridge. I've always struggled with two things: how to organize these enormous collections, and how to have thumbnails available to quickly choose a desired image?
In the early years, I was very anal about how to organize and name files. So I would take collections, even if they were from official catalogs (like clipart explosion) and try to rename and reorganize them for my own purposes. But packages like that usually come with a large book with thumbnails of all the files along with the associated file names. So if I modify that, it makes the book useless. But I was willing to do that because I want the book to be useless. I want to select,view, preview, manage...all that from the computer, so i don't have to keep track of these big books.
The problem is that none of the image viewers out there can deal with vector images in ai/eps. That leaves you with Adobe Bridge as the only option. The problem with Bridge is that it's big and bloated, and everything else you expect from Adobe. It also crashes a lot. The images show up beautifully in their thumbnails, however. Additionally, you can't customize the interface too much. Then, I came across a little known program called ST Thumbnail explorer, which can read and display ai/eps thumbnails. So that was ok for the thumbnail issue. I still ended up using adobe bridge more. ST sometimes was very slow or wouldn't be able to show all the thumbnails. So Bridge is more reliable.
But, my larger question is how do the experts or pros deal with very large clipart collections? The other problem I had with clipart is that if I let my image program create the database of thumbnails, the clipart directories would take FOREVER. You can imagine: it has tons of little files, and each one has to be indexed. Also, whenever I back up my hard drive, the clipart directories would always be the thing slowing it down drastically. Once again, it's because there are so many little files.
That's why i finally decided to rid them off of my main hard drives. Too much headache. I only need to use them a handful of times a year, so I'm just going to move them to another hard drive and back it up to dvd's and be done with them. because it's so hard to create your own index for these things, I gave up on my anal reorganization of them and just left them in their original filenames. But it's SOOOOO hard to find anything. Just browsing through them takes forever. I found myself going to my favorite directories always because they were easy to find and I knew I more or less liked the images there. But that wastes the gigabytes of other images.
Anyway, I guess the same question would apply to professional photographers who have tons of photos. I can't seem to figure out how to manage so many files that are visual in their nature. So I'm archiving them for now. If I find a good solution, I'll bring them back to the hard drive.
Any recommendations/experiences are welcome. Thanks!
In the early years, I was very anal about how to organize and name files. So I would take collections, even if they were from official catalogs (like clipart explosion) and try to rename and reorganize them for my own purposes. But packages like that usually come with a large book with thumbnails of all the files along with the associated file names. So if I modify that, it makes the book useless. But I was willing to do that because I want the book to be useless. I want to select,view, preview, manage...all that from the computer, so i don't have to keep track of these big books.
The problem is that none of the image viewers out there can deal with vector images in ai/eps. That leaves you with Adobe Bridge as the only option. The problem with Bridge is that it's big and bloated, and everything else you expect from Adobe. It also crashes a lot. The images show up beautifully in their thumbnails, however. Additionally, you can't customize the interface too much. Then, I came across a little known program called ST Thumbnail explorer, which can read and display ai/eps thumbnails. So that was ok for the thumbnail issue. I still ended up using adobe bridge more. ST sometimes was very slow or wouldn't be able to show all the thumbnails. So Bridge is more reliable.
But, my larger question is how do the experts or pros deal with very large clipart collections? The other problem I had with clipart is that if I let my image program create the database of thumbnails, the clipart directories would take FOREVER. You can imagine: it has tons of little files, and each one has to be indexed. Also, whenever I back up my hard drive, the clipart directories would always be the thing slowing it down drastically. Once again, it's because there are so many little files.
That's why i finally decided to rid them off of my main hard drives. Too much headache. I only need to use them a handful of times a year, so I'm just going to move them to another hard drive and back it up to dvd's and be done with them. because it's so hard to create your own index for these things, I gave up on my anal reorganization of them and just left them in their original filenames. But it's SOOOOO hard to find anything. Just browsing through them takes forever. I found myself going to my favorite directories always because they were easy to find and I knew I more or less liked the images there. But that wastes the gigabytes of other images.
Anyway, I guess the same question would apply to professional photographers who have tons of photos. I can't seem to figure out how to manage so many files that are visual in their nature. So I'm archiving them for now. If I find a good solution, I'll bring them back to the hard drive.
Any recommendations/experiences are welcome. Thanks!
