Organising library

Personally the excel sheet sounds like extra work to me. I prefer to make a file structure that works organically for me and use a good search program to find what I need when my brain won't remember on it's own. Following is how I organize mine, but near the end I link a couple other interesting forum posts about this sort of thing as well as the program I use for searching. TLDR, just jump to the end and check out the other forum posts and/or see if the program is useful for your requirements 😛

When I first started organizing things I thought I didn't care much about keeping full product names. That ended up being a huge mistake for figuring out if I already had a duplicate since a lot of items end up being reposted and if you have a couple thousand items you're probably not familiar with all of the ones you have; you just thought "damn, that looks cool, I could probably use that in unnamed-project-idea that you won't get around to for a year or so..." 😛

So for storing backup files I recommend keeping the full, original product name on the top tier folder. Personally, I move the SKU to the end of the file name since I like to find products I am familiar with quickly when looking for them visually. You still have the SKU there if you really do need to search by number.

Sorting for how it displays in Daz itself is really a matter of preference. My categories (2nd tier folder is always Content, followed by 3rd tier folder which is where I actually personalize things) are Animations, Environments, Lights & Cameras, People, Props, Scripts and Shaders. I also have Scenes and Presets set one level above those, so they're easy to find at the bottom of my Library tree.

Really, you want to pick categories that make sense for you and how you work. "Props" tend to be the messiest category since every artist thinks props are something different. I tend to reorganize the folder structure of most props so that they fit into a more appropriate category like Environments, or the subfolder of Clothing. Often times poses will require a prop that was separated into Props, I just move it right into the pose folder so I don't have to go looking for it if it's really specific to those poses.

Within the major categories I listed, I break some of them down with further sub-categories. Environments has Exterior and Interior subfolders and those are further subdivided by Vendor. Originally I didn't bother with Vendor categories, but I eventually felt that was a mistake as well. The quality of certain vendors is such that you want to be able to quickly find their other products since they might have something you think will likely work with the scene you're working on.

Props get broken down into Furniture, Vehicles, Weapons, Modern, Scifi, Period. People is the largest breakdown of folders since it gets sorted by G1, G2F, G2M, G3F, G3M, G8F, G8M, M4, V4. Then under each of those Anatomy, Characters (Youth, Elder, Asian, African, European, Other, Inhuman Organic, Inhuman Synthetic), Clothing (Accessories, Footwear, Sci Fi, Period, Modern), Hair (sorted by Vendor), Materials, Poses (Expressions, Hands/Feet, Dynamic, Static) , Props (same as the Prop folder breakdown), Shapes (Faces, Bodies, Full Body, Partials).

In the end it just has to make the most sense to you. For example I put ALL poses in one folder since I'll just convert them to whatever generation or sex of character I'm using. I've even considered just lumping all G3s and G8s into the same folder with an addendum to the folder name so I know exactly what generation it was originally, since it's generally possible to use skins interchangeably. I haven't done it simply because things like morphs don't work with the click of a button 😛

All of this can take a lot of work, but I just slowly work on it ten or thirty items at a time until they're all reworked properly. Anything reworked the way I like it is in a separate folder from the items that aren't so I can easily just grab all "Content" folders en masse and install them very quickly should I need to do a reinstall.

I use a program called Everything that I found on ninite.com (highly recommend, there's some good programs in there and anything you use regularly can be easily kept up to date or reinstalled should the need arise, very useful for fresh OS installs to save some time reinstalling programs you always install) to search quickly for duplicates, it'll search across all your hard drives and has some nice advanced search features. I don't think it can help you with a cloud archive unless that is also on a local drive, as is the case with cloud backups like Dropbox, et al.

It took me quite a while to come to the filing system I currently have and I realize this is a long read, but if you come away with a couple ideas to improve your own system then I'm happy to have contributed.

Good luck and hopefully you'll find some decent answers to your question.

There's a couple other forum topics I read about this sort of thing that might be helpful:

[https://zonegfx.com/forums/topic/feed-up-downloading-dupes-want-an-easy-way-to-catalogue-search-your-content/]

[https://zonegfx.com/forums/topic/manual-install-to-ds/page/6/] Eelgoo explains his directory structure and someone made a PDF out of it, I thought it was a good read.

Also, this dude uses scripts, but I haven't cared enough to get into that sort of thing... yet. [https://zonegfx.com/forums/topic/content-library-rebuild-tips-tricks-help-me-lol/] Maybe there's something in there that you find helpful.

If you really want to get and stay organized, have a look at the free database app "Data Crow." I set it up to enter products with photos, description, filename, location, etc. It's like having your own catalog or wiki...

datacrow.net