Hi,

I use PSE organiser and yes it can be slow but if you recover your database this helps I lot. I had a lot of problems lately but they were also related to my laptop. I've cleaned it up and now it runs great. I have about 12gbs of scrapbooking stuff. But I started organising mine from the beginning.

Organiser allows you to have more than one catalog. I have catalogs for - 'My Photos' (one for each year), 'My purchased scrapbooking and fav supplies', 'My not so fav scrapbooking supplies' and one for 'My pages I have created'. Excessive? - maybe, but it works for me. I recently split my scrapbooking supplies as I had so much stuff to wade thru.

I wouldn't be without Organiser, but I haven't tried any of the other programs mentioned here.

I use both Collections and Tags.

Collections
I create a collection group for each designer I have a kit for and then I create a collection for the kit. I assign each peice of a kit to that collection. This makes it easy to find an entire kit.

Tags
I have an extensive tag system. I have use categories, sub categories and tags. For example I have a Tag Category called 'Embellishments'. Under that I have several tags such as brads, ribbons, eyelets etc etc... Every single item that I have gets a tag (even those in collections). This means that if I want a brad I simply filter by the brad category and I can see all the brads I have.
For papers I have tags for various colours and I also have tags for striped, spotted, patterned, grungy and a few others. Some papers will have more than one tag. A purple stripy paper will get a purple tag and a striped tag.

So this means for each kit I have, every item in it will belong to a Collection and will have at least one tag.

I hope this helps.

Sue

Trish,
Thank you for the info about recover feature. I will use that in the future. I had to retag 12,000 elements because my computer froze in the middle of getting pics from the computer back in December (and my backups didn't work). Hopefully this will help me if this happens again.

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Shawnery Mathis

Hey Trish!

Thanks for the tip! I'm gonna go and try this right now! I am so depressed...my system just CRASHES after the organizer is up for a short period of time. And I only have about HALF of my scrapping stuff imported into there!

I'm off...gotta try this right now!

Thank you so much!

Julie

Thanks Sue! Yup, I think I'm going to tag just about the same way. The only thing different that I did from you is that each page kit/element collection, etc, for me, goes into it's own collection. Then I make a note of the designer's name in the "notes" section for each collection.

Another thing I do that I've found very helpful is that for the little thumbnail image for each kit, I make sure that the preview for the kit is the thumbnail. It is tiny, yes, but at least it gives me a little idea of the colors in the kit.

So, everything I have now is in it's proper collection. I haven't started tagging yet. (GULP)!! That's gonna take a while!