Texture Organization

What's the scoop on organizing textures. And, please lets not discuss texture stealing here?
I own thousands of textures, a fortune in textures! They aren't doing me much good, however as I can't find them! I've bought the best texture organizer gizmos in SL, too.
I think I want to get them into a relational database on my computer but I don't feel like pasting each on a block and photographing it in-world. So, what's that software method for snatching from the graphics processor all those nice texture files, and all nicely taged? I can probably run Perl on the output and take it right into my database software.

So let me get this straight; you want to take textures for which you do not have full permissions and use a 3rd party program to hack your video card to copy them, and you "don't want to discuss stealing"? Well, what exactly is it you think you are discussing?

Let me make this clear and simple. When you buy an item in SL, you agree to abide by the permissions that are on it. You don't own the item itself, just the right to use it in a limited way. Said limits are determined and agreed upon by the buyer and the seller at the time of purchase. If you bought a texture, but you didn't buy the right to copy it, then what you're talking about is absolutely stealing, no two ways about it. It doesn't matter if you're using screenshots like you described, or you're hacking your video card. It's all the same.

If you want textures you can download, buy them with that particular permission. If they didn't come that way, that's that.

In any case, what you're talking about doing wouldn't save you much effort anyway. You still need to be actually looking at the textures in order for them to be in your video card for extraction in the first place. That means you still have to find them all and place them on objects (or at least open them all in the viewer). You can't just pull them out of your inventory automatically. It doesn't work like that.

I'd suggest simply keeping better track of your folders inworld. Come up with a system that makes sense to you, and stick with it. If you've got thousands of textures, it will take you several hours to organize them, but once it's done, it's done. From that point on, just make sure you always organize new textures the same way as the old ones and you'll never run into problems again. It's not really a big deal.

Once again, permissions matter. Your word is your bond, or you're nothing. Keep your agreements, always. If you bought a texture (or anything else) without full permissions, that was your choice, and you must, must, must honor the permission agreement you made with the creator. That's it.

Huh? No, you misunderstand. I have FULL permissions. Got it?
I'm asking: What are functional methods to organize ONE'S textures. If someone wants to discuss the ethics of how I view my texture library then I suppose mention of that is germane here. However, the ethics are clear to me on how I use my textures. Thank you.
(BTW, ther have been interesting discussion groups on the ethics of texture use when the Ethics Group has met online.)

Anyone know how to have facility in getting to one's textures?

Looking for any knowledge or insight on organizing my textures. I'm thinking an off-line viewer is the speedy way to go and the only way to pull on threads of relational groups. You know?

Are there texture retailers who want to collaborate in making texture indexes or offline databases available and handy?

Sorry for misreading you. I thought you were asking for a way to bypass the permissions system since I didn't see any other reason for wanting to pull textures from the graphics card instead of just dowloading them directly, which you can do if you have full perms.

I'm still not sure what exactly you're trying to do. The textures won't be in your video memory unless you're viewing them, it's going to take a lot of manual labor to grab them all, whatever method you use. Pulling them straight out of your inventory into a local database is not an option.

I also don't see how organizing them offline could possibly help you inside SL. My recommendation is still to design a folder tree naming convention that makes sense to you (in your SL inventory), and sort your textures within appropriate folders accordingly.

I normally keep a directory folder structure similar to the one in my inventory in SL. Meaning, if you bought full permission textures inworld, save them down into your drive and organize them. You can do this by double clicking on your texture in the inventory, then go to file and save it as a TGA.

That way you can see the thumbnails quickly offworld. For those who edit or enhance their textures by adding dirt, grime, shadows, etc. they'll do this anyway. I normally derive a family of textures from a simple plain one and keep them bunched together.

The next thing to do is to name or rename them so that they are easily searcheable inworld. Preferably the names are the same both inworld and offworld. For example you can name or rename your textures in the following order of features

i) base material (wood, concrete, steel, etc)
ii) further descriptive information (type of wood, type of steel)
iii) aging or weathering features (scratches, dents, stains, rust etc)
iv) baked or painted shadows and lighting (light coming from top, side shadows, etc)
v) model specific (stains along joints, decals, signs, etc)

So for example, you can have a texture with a names like this

wood_mahogany_weathered.tga
steel_brushed_rusted_bottomlit_pipejoints.tga

I find if its a verbose naming system, you don't even need to sort them in folders inworld.
The texture gizmos in-world are really too slow and inflexible to work with and you'd have to tax your bandwidth loading them as well.

i perosnally cuss LL when i have to do this with snapshots, ill gather up a few hundered and then its off to the ol

dubble click in inventory
wait
wait
wait
wait
ohh almost thre
wait
wait
wait
there
click file menu
click save texture as
wait
goback to inventory and loop (only 199 to go)

wellllll i know and understand (to my best) the waiting for image part, but after waiting almost an hour for a handfull of images im in the mood to kill, esp considering ill whizz all of them tru image magik and batch add them to my website in a matter of seconds...

theres got to be a better way, and if someone figures it out, without adding more texture theft woes ill be supporting it fully

i hate babysitting my computer to click 3 items every x random min

This is why I bought a super quiet case and moved my comp to the living room coffee table in front of the TV. ^^

If you do a control-alt-D, (debug view) and then look for the Client menu list. Turn on the "Console Window"and log off.

Go get a copy of DebugViewNT from Sysinternals and fire it up. Configure it to log the info that will be dumped onto your Debug console window. It's quite easy, just have it running and turn on logging.

When you Re-log onto SL you will get a "DOS" window that is the data dump window (Debug)- ignore it.

When you are logged back on, find "Dump Inventory" under the "Client | UI" menu and select it.

STAND STILL! (LOL). Your hard drive will probably protest for a couple of minutes. When it is done, log off and turn off DebugView.

You will get a list of your inventory items - Names and UUID's. It should be easy to pick out the textures. Clean up the text log from DebugView and import it into the spreadsheet of your choice.

You WON'T have access to anything that you don't have access to in-world, you just get it quicker.

As far as sorting them for use in-world, make note cards with your preferred headings. (Metal, Wood, Sci-Fi, Alpha-Textures, etc) and drop your images onto them. You can even store note cards with textures onto other note cards. (Only textures for which you have full permissions)

Drop copies of those note cards into a box for safe-keeping (label it well).

I usually make Alphabet note cards to store Wood (or Metal or whatever) textures beginning with A, B, C, etc.

You can look at your DB list offline and find the desired item online under the appropriate alphabet note card. This keeps you from having to keep your note carded textures in precise alphabetical order.

Then delete all the excess textures from your invie. They are on the note cards and in the "safe-box"

This is the "Drebin Method".

AH I had never thought of something along the lines of the "Drebin" method or about putting textures on notecards. Played around with it and there is an easier way. Just make a notecard and rename it "Wallpaper" for example. Open the notecard and drag all of your wallpaper textures onto it. EUREKA!!!!! You have all of them on one notecard and you can delete the others from inventory!

That's what I thought I had said....

I'm still wondering why the OP would need a relational database to store textures.

What would the tables be?

It's so that you can run some statistical techniques on the data and use standard deviation to find out which textures look ugly.

It is revealing to the need for fast texture searches that many of you are responding to the question of solving the problem of finding the right texture at the moment of inspiration.
Dr. Drebin seems to have attacked the issue of gathering represtative textures offline and has the start of the solution. Unfortunately for me, his method is for the PC platform and I use the Mac. I will see if I can implement similarly but using the Mac.

Offline viewing is going to be the answer as it must be much faster than waiting for rez to view textures online. You could print a catalog for offline viewing, as well. But, I'm into the paperless office and so would have the pages ready to flash my choices on screen.

As to why a relational database? Well, its not that big a deal if you have ever worked with databases. I use Filemaker. Its just a document viewer of sorts but I can instantaneously see pages of "metals" or "tile", "metal tile", "flower tile", "dark and scarry", or any other category I would make up and label a "thread" to be pulled up. Anyway, database documents are as easy as any other to use.

I just want to go "artist" and find the right texture when I need it and not loose my momentum having to get into waiting for SL sheets to rez. I find I just grap the first thing close to what I want and work with it and hoping to have the time to find the texture I really want later (if ever).

Hey, if someone sets up "client-ware" on a website for potential customers to peruse thousands of textures, relationally organized, and from multiple texture vendors, would any texture seller be interested in offering commision for sales from that site?????

Going to a texture store in SL can also be a miserable experience if you don't have an hour or two to walk down the cute aisles and browse.

If you really want to save the textures to your hard disk for quick reference, best way is to use the save texture as option as Osgeld pointed out, then orginize them how you want. Lots of work, but if you are texturing like mad, it may be worth it.