outfits

MessyBoxes — Image Source: cutelypoisoned.com

In the last post, I talked about the basics of inventory organization and the importance of using sub-folders.

Hopefully you have made some progress sorting your items and getting rid of unnecessary landmarks, photos, and notecards.

In this post, I want to show you how I organize folders with large amounts of items and the reasoning behind the sort.

I’ll also cover how to store older items and how to make outfits.

Let’s get started!

Animations

I have a few folders that contain a metric ton of items.

These include my dance animations folder, my costumes folder, and my ‘stuff for building’ folder. 😀

As a dancer, I have a ton of animations that I’ve collected over the years.

While I could certainly lower my inventory count substantially by boxing up my animations, I don’t.

Well, I do box them, but I also keep them in my inventory. 🙂

(This information only applies if you have copyable animations, which of course you do, right?)

My reasoning is this: Previously, with dance HUDs, you would load the animations into the HUD, and then you really no longer needed them to be accessible in your inventory.

The two dance HUDs I use most now (The Artiste and Spot On PD), are made so that I make a new copy of the HUD for each routine/performance.

That means I need to load the animations I use in the performance into the HUD.

I could rez a HUD (or a box), take the anims I need into inventory, rez my new HUD, and then load the anims into it, but that’s a lot of extra steps and time.

(I do box up all of my animations and store them on my land, but that’s as a precaution against SL ‘eating’ them, rather than inventory count savings.)

When you organize your animations folder, I would recommend that you organize them by store/creator name.

Each store folder may or may not have sub-folders, depending on whether I purchased dance packs or not.

Why do it this way?

Simple.

IP replacements.

If I just dumped all my animations into one big folder, they would sort according to the name of the animation.

Sometimes you can tell by the name of the dance where you bought it, but not always.

However, if they were organized in one big folder and an IP replacement happened (like the big one several months ago), you would have no way to easily or quickly know which animations were replaced (in error, usually).

The IP replaced anims, which are now all named IP *****, will sort by name into a different place in your folder.

Since I have mine organized by store name, I can at least tell which vendor’s anims were affected (in case I need to contact them) and possibly even which animations.

Also, it lets you see pretty quickly if you have already purchased a particular animation from a store – with so many animations, it’s easy to lose track.

Now, this way of organizing may not work for you, and that’s fine.

As long as it makes sense to you, and you can find things when you need them, it’s all good. 🙂

One last thing – I don’t use the system ‘Animations’ folder to store my animations.

I reserve that folder for AOs and old dance HUDs.

Which I should probably box up, since I rarely use them anymore. 😛

Costumes

The way I have sorted my costumes into folders may make no sense to anyone but me.

They are sorted by genres, with some that don’t seem to fit any folders left to float.

I freely admit that I am a costume hoarder.

I had so many costumes they were just getting unmanageable.

Some I was hanging onto for sentimental reasons – my first solo, my first dance at a certain theater, a favorite performance, etc.

But the reality is that I likely won’t wear a costume I got in 2010 again.

I had to box them up.

Since I own a wardrobe system, I took pictures of everything, tagged them, and then boxed up the items.

I then put those boxes in a storage box. 🙂

I still probably have way too many costumes in my inventory, but you never know what you’ll need!

Building Stuff

Because I perform, I also have a ton of decor items to use as props.

Some are large, like entire buildings, some are small, like wall art or bottles, for example.

Again, the way I have them organized may not make sense to others.

That’s ok. 🙂

Just figure out a way to organize things into folders that makes sense to YOU.

I have a lot of folder (categories) and I still have things that I can’t decide go better one place or another.

So I leave them to float until I figure it out.

Under my Decor Items folder, for example, you will find books, statues, vases, and various other tchotchkes.

I have a folder for lighting, a folder for fountains, etc.

You get the idea.

A project on my to-do list is to photograph and categorize the ‘building stuff’ folder using my wardrobe system, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get that done. 😛

Besides, I’m constantly collecting items.

Now that mesh is everywhere, I probably could/should go and delete some old items that are primmy or just not that great looking.

Another project!

Storage Options

One way to help with inventory bloat is to box up old items.

If you don’t own a wardrobe organizing system, Auryn Beorn has a great post on a simple way to box up your items.

Following her system, you can link a bunch of boxes (set to convex hull to save LI) and then fill up the linked prims.

At the end of the process, you have one item in your inventory that you can rez and then reopen the linked boxes if necessary to retrieve your items.

It would never have occurred to me to do it this way, but it’s sheer genius. 🙂

Another option is to buy some scripted storage boxes.

I have some inexpensive ($10L) ones I found on MP.

You drop in the items you want to store in the boxes and then the script allows you click on the box, click to the item you want, and then have that item delivered to your inventory.

Easy!

Whichever system works best for you, it’s a simple way to help reduce that inventory bloat.

If you have a hard time deciding what needs boxing, you can use the search filters to help sort by date acquired.

For instance, I plan to sort out items to delete or box by filtering the search to any items that I acquired over two years (730 days) ago.

If I haven’t used it in two years, odds are I won’t be, so I am probably safe to box it up or delete it. 🙂

The last item I want to cover is making outfits.

If you want to save all the items you’re wearing into an outfit that you can wear again, you create an outfit.

Click on the little t-shirt icon to bring up with outfit window.

Click on the ‘wearing’ tab, then click ‘save as’ and give your new outfit a name.

Doing this will create a folder (with the name you typed) in the system ‘outfits’ folder.

In the olden days, you had to manually make outfits by moving all the pieces and parts into a folder.

If you had a no-copy item, then sometimes it was hard to remember where you put things.

Using the outfit creator makes a folder with links to all the items, not the actual items themselves.

So your shoes, for example, can remain in your shoes folder, but your outfit folder will have a link to them.

This way, it’s possible to save various outfits for quick changes.

You could have a formal outfit, a casual outfit, a beach outfit – the list is endless. 🙂

Once you have created the outfit, you leave the folders in the system ‘outfit’ folder, or you can move the folder to any other folder in your inventory.

Moving the newly created outfit folder will not break any of the links inside.

Moving folders containing the original items doesn’t break the links either.

Once you delete the item from trash, however, the link is broken.

You generally get a pop-up warning that the item is linked before you delete it, but be careful!

One thing to be aware of, since the goal here is to reduce inventory bloat – links count as items.

That’s another job on my to-do list – to delete old outfit folders!

I organize them into sub-folders by date, so I know approximately how old they are.

Things move a lot faster in SL, so odds are that items I bought and wore back in December 2014 probably aren’t high on my ‘wear this’ list in July. 😛

One Last Trick

One last little inventory tip/trick, especially for you bloggers out there!

Someone mentioned this on Plurk and I felt like a complete idiot for not knowing it.

If you are blogging an outfit and you need a list of everything you’re wearing, open the create outfits window.

Click on the wearing tab (like you’re creating a new outfit).

Instead of ‘save as,’ click on the gear icon in the lower left of the window.

A pop-up box will appear and one of the options is ‘copy outfit list to clipboard.’

Click this and all your worn items can now be pasted into your blog post.

You will likely have to format it, but all the items will be listed.

This has saved me tons of time and eye strain, clicking back and forth between my blog editor and my inventory window, trying to make sure I don’t miss anything!

That’s it for tips on how to tame your messy inventory.

I hope you discovered a few new tricks and I encourage you to stay on top of organizing your inventory.

Happy sorting!