Organizing my inventory?

[Juliviere]

I am looking for answers on how people decide to organize their inventory, I understand that people have their own ways they do it and I would like to hear so I can put something together for myself. I keep second guessing myself on how I should set it up. I do not want to end up with a cluttered inventory.

[Rolig Loon]

That is a very admirable goal.  I wish that I had done it 11 years ago, but by the time I realized that organization might be the sane and responsible approach, it was too late.  The bottom line, as you might expect, is that you should do whatever you feel most comfortable with.  There are practical reasons for using as many levels of subfolders, subsubsubfolders, and subsubsubfolders as you can.  The servers have to upload your inventory (not the items, but the pointers that constitute the inventory that you see) to your viewer as you log in to SL, and that takes time.  If you have more than a few thousand (5000?) items in a single, undivided folder, the whole process can time out before you are logged in.  So ... use lots of subfolders  (Clothing >>> Dresses >>> Summer >>> Formal >>> Pink >>> With Flowers >>> And bees ).  The more specific your folder labels can be, the easier it will be to search for stuff later.  That said, it is a LOT easier in the end if you use the system folders as your main organizing elements rather than, for example, having all your clothing items scattered at random through inventory instead of being sure that they are all in your Clothing folder.

As a creator, I find that the greatest problem I face is having multiple copies of the same thing, often differing in subtle ways ... version 1, version 2 ... version 2a .... etc. I find it useful to include a date or version number in the name of each item so I can tell them apart.  Unfortunately, I work with other creators who have their own schemes, and we trade working copies back and forth.  That means I will have someone else's version 2a of a script that I originally labeled version 3 (9-27-2017).  You may not become a creator, but you will almost certainly have some version of that headache as you accumulate objects that were named by other people.

The only other general bit of advice that most people will probably agree on is that you should purge your inventory regularly of outdated items.  Notecards and landmarks get stale VERY fast and they seem to accumulate like hamsters if you let them get out of hand.  So do all of the "objects" and other silly things that you make on a whim. I have been able to keep my inventory at between 33,000 and 37,000 items for the past 5 years, but only by diligent pruning.  Oh, and don't forget to take out the Trash.  When you delete inventory, it doesn't disappear ... it moves to your Trash folder, so it still counts in the total.  When you purge the Trash folder, then it disappears... forever.

[Lindal Kidd]

One caution about emptying Trash.  There is a bug that occasionally will put whole folders of your inventory in the Trash folder without you noticing.  If you are in the habit of deleting the Trash regularly, you could lose a bunch of stuff you did not expect.

The viewer now has a partial defense against this built into it.  When you empty your Trash, a message appears saying "XX items will be deleted.  Continue?"  If the number shown is unexpectedly huge, don't continue!  Check the contents of the Trash folder to make sure you are not throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

[Lindal Kidd]

One caution about emptying Trash.  There is a bug that occasionally will put whole folders of your inventory in the Trash folder without you noticing.  If you are in the habit of deleting the Trash regularly, you could lose a bunch of stuff you did not expect.

The viewer now has a partial defense against this built into it.  When you empty your Trash, a message appears saying "XX items will be deleted.  Continue?"  If the number shown is unexpectedly huge, don't continue!  Check the contents of the Trash folder to make sure you are not throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

[LittleMe Jewell]

As Rolig said, the most important thing is lots of layers in your inventory.  Most of us will organize our clothing by type and then possibly by creator, though others will first organize by creator and then by type.  Mine is roughly Dresses, Pant/Short Outfits, Individual Pieces, Specialty.  Then within Dresses I'll divide into Long, Short, Mid-length, Era Dress, Costumes. My shoes will get organized by type and then color, though some will do by color and then type.  For hair, I separate by style with no subcategories within that, but if you have lots of different colors (rather than a single HUD for color change), then you might want to make that a sub-category, or top category with styles inside of that. Most of it will depend on how you prefer to access your items.  I also keep a folder specifically for items that still need to be sorted, tried on, and filed.  Within that I have subfolders for general types - clothing, shoes, hair, etc... but no further sub-divisions there.

Personally, I use the system folders (with subfolders) for many things (landmarks and notecards), but not for clothing or a few other things that are not coming to mind right now.  Instead, I created my own folders that start with an an exclamation point followed by spaces, as those will sort to the top.  Additionally, I don't keep things in the 'objects' folder.  If there is anything in there, then I know that it is new stuff that I haven't dealt with in any way yet. Some generally easy cleanup is to use the filters and find all landmarks and then clear out the many duplicates that you get from shopping.  Similar with notecards from the creators -- some will include a thank you or general info notecard in every package.  Do a search for 'pose stand' - you'd be surprised at how many creators give you one in every package.  And filter on scripts - you often end up with the unpacking script in the folders.  If you have a mesh body and thus don't need the included alpha for mesh clothing, that is something else that can quickly clutter your inventory.

 

Side note - I've never encountered the Trash issue, but I also empty my trash 'almost always' before logging out.  So it usually never has more than a session's worth in it and thus is never more than a couple of hundred items - and only that big if I was messing with lots of demos or was doing lots of inventory cleanup.

Edited October 27, 2017 by LittleMe Jewell

[Lindal Kidd]

We all have our methods...or non-methods...of organizing inventory.  For example, I use my Clothing system folder for clothing, while Lil has a separate one.  I use my Objects folder for...well, just about anything that ISN'T clothing or body parts or textures or animations.  But I have tons of sub-folders in there...Buildings and Parts, Landscaping, Furniture, Food and Drink, Seasonal, Vehicles, Musical Instruments, Party Stuff, and many many others.

[Nalates Urriah]

After years in SL I've changed how I do inventory a couple of times.

First, it is possible to develop a problem logging in if you let your inventory get too far out of control. The viewer downloads inventory as a list of names and UUID's, the uniform unique identifier. It downloads folder by folder. If you have a weak connection to the SL servers and loads of items in a single folder, like 5,000, you may not be able to login. So... as far fetched as it sounds a significant number of users hit this problem and the Lab had to develop a tool so support could fix the problem.

This is called the flat inventory problem. Each folder is an item, but the things in a folder do not add to the count of the parent folder. So, your inventory is unlimited.

I started out grouping things in categories. So, in Clothes -> Costumes, dresses, pants, swimsuits... It works pretty well. But, soon I had to divide into categories inside those Dresses ->short, medium, long, and evening dresses. I pushed it along that line for a long time. 

Now I have a mesh body and my classic clothes seldom get worn. So, I started clearing out old stuff I would never wear again. That got to be a job. Too much new stuff mixed in with old stuff. So now I use years as a folder name.

Dresses
  2014
  2015
  2016
    Fav
    Casual
    Short
    Sexy
  2017
     Fav
     Casual
     etc

Outfits have also become an important part of my dressing process. So, I use links and and outfits.

I may buy a Fat Pack dress. I use the HUD to set the options, then save a copy and strip the scripts out of the copy. So, a dress folder may look something like:

Addams Hot CFM Mini
   Xtra - This holds all the copies for bodies I don't have... but someday may buy - plus the other stuff I don't need
   Wear - This holds all the various configurations I wear with the scripts striped out.
      Red w/black belt
         Hot CFM Mini - this is the dresses actual name which I may not be able to change because Copy-OK but No-Mod
      Teal w/white belt
         Hot CFM Mini - another copy...
       More color configurations...
   Hot CFM Mini - The original scripted mini I use to make copies - wear, set, remove, copy
   Hot CFM Mini HUD - the HUD

When I make an Outfit the links use a copy in the folder with a color name, which has the script removed. 

It works for me.