Preview Inventory Window and...

Revamp the inventory please starting with thumbnail views of our textures, heck i would settle for a small pic about 75x75 pixels right now.

The entire inventory needs a overhaul but the simplest solution would be to let ppl download their inventory to their hard drive, organize it and re upload it.

Even when there is very little else going on, organizing inventory can take literaly days to accomplish.

Cath

Would be neat if we had preview windows for textures, photos, clothing, and maybe even objects.

But textures would be especialy helpfull.

The inventory definitly needs a revamp, hopefully it'll come soon.

Also a texture preview window would be usefull in selecting textures for objects, instead of a drop down give us a scroll window with previews of all the textures, would make selecting a texture for a prim alot faster.

Why this will not work:

I like most people have 2k+ textures in my inventory.

You inventory really only contains a pointer to the KEY of the textures. So, in order to display thumbnails, your client would have to download every texture that you own from the asset server.

There should be some kind of texture preview window where you could compare several textures at once, but it shouldn't attempt to preview every texture in your inventory.

I find the texture drop down menu to be very innefficient, as I have a few hundred textures and have to scroll through all of them. I think that it would be nice if there were collapsable folders in the menu. Or if you could turn texture sets on and off, like font managers do with fonts. I do think that an image that could be attached to an object's description would be nice. It would only have to be a 6k mini web-res image, to show on mouseover. Many of thes inventory inconviences could be fixed by adding a search feature. I think that the inventory needs some major work.

Agreed, Goshua! The dropdown menu is annoying to the point of uselessness. It's simply not practical for anyone who has more than a couple dozen textures in their inventory -- IE, everyone.

The reason it's never been redesigned to use a tree-based structure is because (as far as I can tell) that particular widget was never implemented in the SL UI. There simply IS no drop-down tree. That said, they should still implement it.

I'm new, and I don't have thousands of textures yet, however I find the inventory system very efficient. I like that pointer system someone mentioned earlier because my cable provide is sucky and laggy and even on broad band I couldn't wait for every texture to download.

Here is a sugestion for you if you have too many textures.

1) create a folder for copies of textures you made so that you will always be able to find *your* textures.

2) create folders that organize objects and textures by material appearance, fabric, wood, glass, metal, fire, -> red, blue, green, ... etc

3) try putting textures you don't like, or haven't used in a really long time into a separate subfolder tree. Then delete some of them after a while if they really prove usesless.

4) create a temp folder for items you are working on. Where you can put in-progress objects and their associated scripts and textures. I call mine workbench

I like their tree folder inventory system, although sometimes I drag stuff to the wrong folder and it's currently not as organized as I would like, but I can't take care of that myself.

However, I do have to request the ability to download my inventory for back up purposes only. Given that the ToS says that they can't gaurantee that they will not lose our data, and that everything can be reset at any time, I would really apreciate it if I could download a backup inventory periotically. Even if at the cost of linden cash. I wouldn't expect the ability to extract or decript the inventory as other peoples' intelectual property is in their as well. I just want the ability to get through a serious server crash or data lose without jumping off of the top of a second life sky scraper.

What about a preview window thingy kinda like how Explorer has, when you click an image it would give you a small thumbnail image. This would still be faster than double clicking (opening) the image because the image would be smaller, and you could scroll through the files (using down arrow) and get a quick preview of them. This would also not force you to download each thumbnail.

The mouseover idea would work well too.

And you can save some things to your HD, such as scripts by copy and paste, and note cards, and even images if they are copyable (open the image then click File -> Save Texture As... I think), but I agree more backing up would be nice.

Paradigm, those are good tips for organizing your inventory, but they don't solve the problem that when you open the texture picker it gives you all your carefully organized textures in one big long alphabetical list without any other organization.