Organization

Hi All,

this is something that just drives me crazy and is probably due to a failure of discipline on my part, but after yet again losing track of which version of a particular texture I had uploaded, I was wondering if any of you have any tricks or systems for keeping track of your revisions.

I usually just number them (#52,846...#52,847... sigh...) but I have found that when I get a little creative and "tweeky" I sometimes end up editing over the last nice version of a texture and messing myself up.

My desk is a wreck, too, though. So maybe I'm just kind of sunk on this score.

Thanks for any bright ideas,
Anik

I name things descriptively so that, in six months, when I need that texture I made that I can't remember the name of I can search for nouns that describe it: brass crosshatch, or deco wallpaper, or mosaic grey, etc.

I try to keep it simple. Simple ways for the simple mind. When I start to make a texture I usually have something in mind (which is often quite different once I have finished). I usually name the texture something that relates to the orginal idea. Then if I mod it later I just rename with a number in sequence. Sometimes I will completely rename it according to what the final texture actually looks like.

I also try to keep textures that are similar in separate folders within the texture main folder. Such as building textures are in a folder named "Building", Clothing textures (the ones I've made using the clothing templates) in a folder name "My Clothing", Textures made for prim clothing in a folder named "Fabrics", etc.

I works for me.........hope I've helped.

I have a complete copy of my inworld texture folder on my hd purely for preview reasons. I name what I create in a logical way and a version number if I change it, and after uploading immediatly put it in the right folder (and in the same folder on HD)

Offcourse doing such a thing when you have 20k textures is hard, but I used my method since day one.
Someone gave me one of those organizers when I started out and warned me about an out of control texture folder.
So since that organizer did not work well (and honestly NONE inworld work properly, due to sircumstances the devices cannot change) I started DLing them to HD for this purpose.

As for creating: I always and always work with copies only. If I made a texture and later wanna alter it, I first copy it inside PSP and then start playing with it. Ensuring I do NOT overwrite the original.

If you have the disk space and are using Photoshop, save each revision as a new layer in your master file. You can be as creative as you want with the naming there, and all you ever have to search for is a single file on your hard drive.

If you've uploaded something into SL and you need to find out which revision it is out of a possible 843, you can save it back to your hard drive, copy it into your master file as a new layer, set it to difference mode and compare it very rapidly to each of your revisions. Any significant difference will pop out at you as a lighter color against black in your image window. A matching layer will appear as solid black, minus the small differences associated with J2C compression.

Date the texture.. I do that a lot with things that change such as scripts and ongoing texture fiaskos put the date on every version except the final

In addition to the other good advice already presented here, I recommend setting your inventory to sort by date. That way, even if a hundred versions of a texture all have the same name, you'll be able to see which one is newest right away. Also, try to get in the habit of deleting older versions as you replace them with newer ones, if you're not going to need both.