Inventory Advice

Hello everyone,

I would like to invite everyone to share their advice on Inventory management. It seems to be a highly desirable skill - I'm fairly new at this but already I've got so much stuff I hardly know what's what.

Are there any golden rules? Is it possible to buy a box or a wardrobe or whatever object scripted to store stuff so that it disappears from the Inventory while it's stored away?

Maybe there are some super-clever ways of managing the Inventory monster? I really wonder how people who build lots of stuff kerep track of everything they've got - I mean, it's hard to delete something you've created, so presumably if you build tons of stuff you have an extra big inventory too.

Also, is there a foolproof way of preventing stuff from disappearing? I lost a few items on one occasion; part of them magically reappeared upon relogging, but part was gone for good. The stuff I lost wasn't very valuable, but I should I have spent hours making a scripted object only to see it disappear, I'm sure it would hurt.

I've asked here for help about the Library, and the response was great. As before, your responses may be quoted in a piece about SL, of course with every quote clearly attributed to its author.

If you could share any of your Inventory wisdom, I'd be be very grateful

Sub-Folders are your friend. Making your own folders to keep "important" stuff and your "single copy" objects really helps keeping things organized.

It's never too early to organize. I've been playing for almost 2 years, and I have 24k items.... It sucks because it's not organized.

Someone reading this certainly has a link to Willow's inventory management post. I'm sure of it...

I recommend naming objects, preferrably as soon as you rez them. Nothing like spending an afternoon looking for a Centaur's left haunch you know is one of those objects.

I'm thinking, too, of making a project cube or other shape for my projects. I can store shades I used on the prim, and put other textures in contents and keep them in the folder with the project. I think that will make it easier when I go back to finish a project I dropped some time ago. Also scripts animations and notes on a notecard.

I have a friend who throws up a black wall while she's sorting.

Someplace in world I saw a texture organizer. I thought I bought it, but I couldn't find it in my inventory.

I think of it the same way I think of organizing my hard drive.

General folder, more specific subfolder, specific subfolders...i.e: clothing, casual, shoes

or

Building Materials, textures, exterior textures, brick

I recognized the problem shortly after I started playing and spend around 30 minutes of every session cleaning up, naming and moving around.

Something I just discovered last night in terms of clothing: activate the debug menu (ctrl-alt-D) and then go to the bottom of it and select "clothing". A list of everything you have that's defined by the system as clothing appears and can be put on / removed via the list. Hopefully the new release tools are better, but the above is a good way to the undershirt under the shirt under the jacket that you think you might have on.

Storage Boxes
It is possible to put items in prim 'boxes' to reduce 'inventory clutter', and reduce the complexity of your inventory. This speeds up inventory access for your remaining items, and for copyable items gives you a way to store a 'backup set', by keeping a copy in-world, or better yet, by giving copies to friends or to one of your own alts. The down side is that it's harder to access the stuff that you 'pack for long term storage'.

Here is how you do it.

WARNING: If you want to store no-copy stuff this way, such as purchased clothes that you don't wear very often, make SURE the storage box has been named BEFORE you put the first no-copy item into the box! I advise keeping the no-copy stored items seperate from the copy-permitted ones, because while there is a no-copy item in a storage box, the entire box can't be duplicated.

You rez a prim, drop several items in it, give it a name, like 'ZZZ - Collected Freebie Avatars', and when you take it back into inventory, it's a single item, instead of possibly hundreds of items. The problems with this is that you can't create heirarchical folders within a prim's contents. In fact, you can't even create first level folders there. So what you do is nest storage boxes. For example, you make a prim and call it 'Schoolgirl outfit, red plaid'. You drop the pieces that make up that outfit into the box, making sure all the permissions are correct and that it's properly named. You then take that into inventory, and drag a copy into your 'ZZZ - Collected Freebie Women's Clothes' box. Then you do the same for 'Schoolgirl outfit, blue plaid version', 'Hippie miniskirt and fringed vest', or whatever else you want to keep a copy of, as stored stuff.

Once you have made one of these storage collections, if everything in it is is copy-enabled, and if you have land that you can store a few prims on, you can store one copy of the box in-world, or you can give a copy to a friend (or an alt) to keep in their inventory, in case yours ever gets corrupted. I highly advise doing that, as inventories are just collections of data records in the asset server database, and if that gets corrupted, Linden Labs is NOT responsible for restoring lost content!

If a storage box contains no-copy items, just take it back into inventory when it has been packed. It will only be a single item there.

Now, the great side of this is you have just stored all those seldom-used items 'in the attic', and they only take up one prim of space! Yay! Inventory sorts faster, and you're not looking through your closet through 50 items that you wouldn't be caught dead wearing to anything other than a costume party, when looking for one of your favorite outfits.

The down side is... they are packed, and you can't search inventory to FIND any of those items unless you look inside the contents of each box and see what's there! Ever open a box that's been stored for years? Ever been surprised that you even owned half the stuff in there, or that you bothered to keep it? Um hummm...

Note that you can repeat this as much as needed. Have a prim called "ZZZ - The Attic", and store all the other boxes in that...

i will tell you my secret to MY perfect inventory system

first of all every matching outfit gets its own prim box and is labeled according to what that outfit is and its primary color also certain outfits i match up and wear together that were once singles go into their own boxes and jewelry sets also

then i bought the copyable no transfer organizer boxes from THINC and i have one for each major color group and ones for things such as formals jewelry hair i dont wear often skins i dont wear often ..

then those outfits and such go into those wonderful organizer boxes...why are the thinc boxes so wonderful they have arrows on them and you can tab thru them and see the name of the outfit you put on the prim box displayed above them and retrieve which outfit you want

then for me as a buider all of my projects also go into labeled prim boxes and then into the THINC organizer boxes

now for my 4500+ textuers i have those are into organized by type THINC texture machines i got the copyable no transfer machines so i could pull a fresh one out for say castle type textuers and put all my castle ones in there...all my tile textures go in one and so on and so forth

my entire inventory is this way and it is mainly because of the library that my inventory is at 2000 yes you read it right my inventory is at 2k and i grumble over it constantly i hate it when it even inches over 2k i try to keep it as low as possible so i do not get any inventory lag

and what to do with all those photo's...i have a copyable tv that i put them in labeled and organzied....one for each friend and pic's with that friend..one for family...one for this or that group....and if i need to break it out i can set it out..put it on photo and tab thru it to see them ..but i do normally have one set out with special photos in it to display in my house and that way i dont have to keep photo's in my inventory at all i even have 1 that is all no copy no mod pics so i know to be careful with that one in particular

if you have any questions IM Tyci Kenzo in game and ill do my best to help you out i only wish i could offer this as a business

Here's the Willow post. How to mananage a 47,000+ item inventory.

Thank you all, that's great. I'm sorry to be asking such inane questions but it's only now that I'm getting a handle on what's what in SL.

Special thanks to DolphPun Somme, Rakkasa Lewellen, Tyci Kenzo; and very special thanks to Ceera Murakami for what's practically a mini-article, and to Wildefire Walcott for finding the link - you two never fail! I'll be quoting you guys.

Now, if you'd like to contribute your own special tips on avatar appearance, I'll be starting a new thread very soon.

Thank you all once again.