Tips For Taming Your Messy Inventory

Image Source: simrestartsecondlife.blogspot.com

Have you ever bought something you ‘had to have’ and then promptly lost it in your mess of an inventory?

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could organize your inventory for you?

I wish that offering my services as an ‘inventory organizer’ in SL was possible, but since that would require sharing passwords (which is a violation of TOS), it won’t be happening. 😦

So, I’m going to do the next best thing and show you some easy steps you can take to organize your inventory.

I use Firestorm, so that’s what the pictures will show.

However, you should be able to do most/all of the same things using the official viewer as well.

The Basics

Some basic folders

The first thing you have to do is decide what type of sorting scheme makes the most sense to you.

For me, I sort items by type – clothing, body parts, scripts, animations, etc.

Maybe you want to sort by store name or something else – whatever you choose, just be consistent.

There are some ready-made system folders, you can make your own folders, or you can use a combination (which is what I do).

The default for sorting folders is that the ‘system’ folders to the top.

I don’t like that, so I change my sort to be by name.

If you click on the gear icon in the lower left of the inventory window, you will see all the different sorting options.

The other thing to know, when you sort by folder name, is that using characters in the folder name will affect how they are sorted.

Have you ever noticed that items like .:Store Name:. get sorted differently than {Store Name}?

A handy little guide to how ASCII characters (like ., :, and {}) get sorted can be found here.

The highest sorting ASCII symbol is !.

So if you name your folder !Clothes, it will sort that folder to the top of the list (assuming no other folders have ! at the beginning).

(Just FYI, the { symbol actually gets sorted AFTER the other symbols and letters of the alphabet – so that would be a good symbol to use when naming folders you don’t use often.)

When you’re making folders, it’s also good to use sub-folders.

While having a large inventory can cause issues, the most issues occur when you have a ‘flat’ inventory.

That is, you have the inventory folder and no sub-folders.

To avoid headaches with your inventory not loading, and also so you can find things, it’s good to get in the habit of using sub-folders.

Sub-Folders

When you sort inventory, it’s best to have two inventory windows open.

Then you can easily move items from one window/folder to another and avoid that pesky ‘droplosting‘!

Sub-Folders

I use sub-folders for lots of things, including clothing, animations, and building – probably my three largest inventory folders. 🙂

Here you can see the sub-folders I have made under the ‘Clothing’ folder.

I have separated my mesh clothing from my clothing that uses systems layers.

Under the @Mesh Clothes folder, you’ll find folders for Dresses, Pants, Skirts, etc.

I have a separate sub-folder for jewelry, and of course, one for shoes.

In the clothing folder, I can also find accessories (hats, scarves, bags, etc.) and nail appliers.

Again, how you decide to sort/organize doesn’t matter – just do it in a way that makes sense to you. 😛

You can also have sub-folders within sub-folders within sub-folders (did that make your brain hurt?).

Shoes!

As you can see, under the ‘Shoe’ folder, I have a number of sub-folders, based on the type of shoe.

I used to use my N-Core the most, so they are sorted to the top.

I now use my Maitreya/Slink shoes more often, but they appear near the top, so I haven’t renamed my folders as yet.

I also used to separate shoe packs that had both Slink and Maitreya versions into different folders.

However, that got to be time-consuming, as well as adding to the number of items (because I would copy HUDs, for example, to each folder).

So now those shoes go into their own combined sub-folder.

Some items come with so many pieces, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Just start slow, and work at organizing bit by bit.

If you get overwhelmed (or just sick of moving folders!), take a break and go do something else.

It will still be there when you get back. 😀

Inventory Bloat

If you want to reduce the number of items in your inventory, there are a few items that you can sort pretty quickly and easily.

Those include notecards, landmarks, snapshots, and textures.

Filters

When you buy an item, you will typically find the item, perhaps a texture/photo of the item, and a LM to the store.

If you buy from the same stores repeatedly, you end up with lots of copies of the same NC’s and LM’s.

One of the easiest way to find and delete these duplicates is to use the search/filter features.

So, for example, if I wanted to search my inventory for all LM’s to Purple Moon, I could type Purple Moon in the search box, and then only click the box next to landmarks in the filters box.

Then you could delete all the duplicate landmarks you find.

You can also store landmarks within a notecard.

You just drag and drop the LM into the notecard.

I used to do this regularly.

However, because landmarks seem to change so frequently, these days I generally just use my teleport history to find the landmark I need.

You can also save snapshots and textures in a notecard (as long as they are full perm).

I have a texture organizer for my building textures, but for personal items like snapshots, profile pictures, etc., I use a notecard to store those.

My Photo Album folder only has about 4 notecards in it.

Within those notecards are tons of photos and textures that I want to keep.

But since I have saved them IN a notecard, I only have that one item in my inventory, rather than 100’s of pictures.

Spacesaver

Did you know you can also save a notecard within a notecard? 😀

For example, with my blog, I have interviewed a lot of dancers.

I don’t want to delete the various notecards that were exchanged, but I don’t need them clogging up my inventory either.

So, I saved each notecard into a master notecard.

That way, I can access the original notecards if I need to, but I can lower my inventory count by doing this.

This is also how I store my old choreography notecards.

So I can access them when I need/want to, but I don’t have 1000’s of notecards just sitting in my inventory.

(The notecards need to be full perm in order to be saved within a notecard.)

Next Steps

I hope these simple tips helped you with organizing your inventories.

I have a few more tips and tricks to share, but since this post is already lengthy, I will save them for the next post.

Stay tuned for tips on sorting dance animations, costumes, different storage options, how to make outfits, and more!