How to organise items in inventory/storage into different folders?

[SenaMarisole]

Hi there everyone I need some guidance to store up my items properly. I've lost count of my items and I couldn't find the items I need easily. Thanks!

[Rolig Loon]

Everyone has a different way of organizing things, and I doubt that any of them is the "best" way.  You just have to find a way that makes sense to you. 

There are a few common sense rules that can guide you, though.  For example, the larger your inventory is, the more likely it is that you will eventually have trouble logging in and start losing large sections of inventory. So, a good rule is to keep throwing away things that you don't need, or at least boxing them up.  Once you put a collection of things into a box, the box only counts as one inventory item, so you have lightened your load.  If you have transferable items that you can't bear to get rid of, you can also give them to an alt for safe keeping, as long as her inventory doesn't get too big.

Another rule.... It's easier to find things in a small, well-marked folder than in a large, generic folder.  So, instead of throwing all of your clothes into the Clothing system folder, it's wiser to make a folder for pants, another for dresses, and another for coats, for example.  You can put subfolders inside of folders, too, so you can separate casual dresses from ball gowns and costume dresses.  I organize my system Script folder with a subfolder for Client Scripts, and then a set of sub-sub folders for each client.  Each of those contains a folder for each separate project, and sometimes subfolders for  different stages of the work.  The idea is to make it easy to find exactly the script I am looking for by associating it with the client, project, and ideas that I was following at the time I wrote it.

Another rule .... It's easier to find items with distinctive names than ones that could be almost anything. Unfortunately, every new object you create is called "Object", every new script is called "New Script", and every new notecard is called "New Notecard". If you don't change their names immediately, you'll never tell one from another.  And it doesn't help to give them forgettable names.  "Blue Hat" is harder to recognize later than "Blue Hat from Buffy - Oct 6, 2015".  Your own name for something is more likely to make sense to you later than a name someone else gave it, too.

You can think of other logical rules and can make up some of your own.  Sadly, you're likely to think of them after you have already made a mess of your inventory and it's too late to clean everything out and start over.  I didn't start to make sense of mine until I had been in SL for 3 or 4 years and had almost 20,000 items, so I still have a lot of old, poorly organized junk alongside newer, sensibly organized things. I started forcing myself to spend a few days every 6 months or so to clean house and throw out things I don't need.  I don't have enough patience to ever finish the job, but at least I have kept my inventory at barely over 30,000 items for the past 5 years.  Maybe you'll do better.

If you are looking for mechanical help, I think the Firestorm viewer offers a more useful set of inventory tools than the other viewers.  They make it a bit easier to search and sort things.  Take a look at http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/my_inventory_tab to see what I mean.

[ChinRey]

NCI has a class named "MAKING SENSE of your INVENTORY". I haven't taken it myself (took a similar class at BB as a newcomer) but NCI classes are alway top notch and it certainly seems to fit you question.

You missed it this week but it's held regularly at the NCI South classroom:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Hamnida/229/95/112