Texture Thumbnailing

Hey all! I did a search and found the only requests for this feature are now WAY old, so figured it was time to bring it up again....

I'm a relatively new member to the SL community, but not so to graphics design ... so in true form I went crazy collecting every free texture I ran across, and even picked up some I had to buy!

As a result I now have something like 2000 textures in my inventory (Just a guess, but one package alone says it has 1000)

I've started sorting them all out into folders... YAY!... It's a process and a half tho ... Even still I have some folders with easily 25, 50 or more textures! ...

Then I go to texture something, and have to wait while each one generates a thumbnail-esq thing in the selection dialog .... This can take several seconds, considerably longer for large textures!

I've wasted away 30 minutes to an hour sometimes just hunting down a nice texture for a single part of a build! Or worse yet, paid the flippin L$10 to upload one from my personal on PC collection just to keep from habing to spend forever searching my inventory... What a PAIN!

So this is my suggestion/proposal

1) Give us some sort of thumbnail view of our textures!!

2) Include a prefrence option to set a customizable size for the thumbnails

3) Store the thumbnails in a localized (On the client puter, ie my HD for my textures) cache file to increase loading speed and reduce server xfer times .... This would have an additional side effect of reducing overall lag on the server, as I could quickly skim through and only pick out the textures I'm most interested in seeing on my prim, rather then downloading and flipping through 50 of them!

4) Allow the thumbnailing to also be done in the inventory window, making sorting of textures into folders easier

5) (Would be a kewl addition, but further then my original scope) Allow deffinition of some thumbnail types, ie upper body, lower body, etc... so if I'm making a t-shirt, the thumbs look like shirts ... sleeve parts put where the sleeves would actualy be, etc... rather then flat squares with pieces over here, and other pieces over there ... anyone that's made some clothes, or custom tats/furs for thier AV know what I mean

Any thoughts?

Your friendly neighborhood clothes designing furry -- Tossi

I believe there are some products that might solve your problem. I know that THiNC has a texture organizer, and I believe I've seen another somewhere.

Try SL Exchange...

Oh my gawd, Me too. I am texture collecter, too! *hehe*


Clothes and stuff too! I would love to. Like maybe 60x60 thumbnails or so!

Because there are million different type of jeans. So we need to look at them quicky than search for million hours to find. *grin* I no good at remember those stuff's names since I'm new or even some people name the objects or/and clothes differently. I have few white freebies tops. They are quite similar names. Pictures does help.

Thanks Persephone,

I will look into it for sure! ... I saw something calling itself a texture manager when I was aimlesly walking about one evening... but realy, it was little more then a vendor machine .... I'm not so sure about having to whip out a machine, and clicking through it to find a texture, then having to 'buy' (Sure only L$0, but it's yet an extra click) it, then pull it out of inventory to see how it looks on the item in question, then deleting it and search for a better one and then having finaly found the right one having to remove the machine ... seems like a lot of extra work, and I doubt it would be any faster as it still has to download each of the textures from the server before it can be viewed ... Not to mention the rules where I rent my work studio specificly say 'No active scripts' so a vendor type thing might get me in hot water with the management .....

*Chuckles and waves to Xia* Hi there! ... Youre telling me! ... and then there's those guys that name thier textures really descriptively ... like "Texture-0078' ... which is of course a brick texture, not to be confused with 'texture-0077' and 'Texture-0079' which are fabric textures! (These names are not real, but I have similar incidents) ... Not to mention the ones that use some common name (say "brick texture", you get 10 things all in your texture folder with the same exact name, but each of them a different texture, it gets agrivating... there is no possible way to remember what they all are!

I have of course started renaming them to things more appropriate, but then you don't know when you run across a new box if it's ones you already hae or not, and you wind up with duplicates! ... Have you ever tried to look through a folder of 100 items, one at a time, trying to find and remove dupes! It's practicly impossible!!

-- Tossi, your friendly, furry, neighborhood, inventory hound

I'd vote for this for sure.

2000 is pretty low compared to what I've collected. And now I'm uploading my own too. And I wish I could say I'm being anal and organized about it, but I'm not. I think the suggestions put forth here are pretty clear and would benefit a large portion of the SL community.

Char

*Reads the two newest replies*

Hey there! ... Thanks for your support! ... I'll likely make it an official proposal soon... I'll post here when I do *smiles*

-- Tossi