Image Organization

[Jennifer Keating]

I'm not an embroidery professional, but I'm helping my friend with the non-embroidery IT side of her business.  She uses mysewnet and embrilliance.  The issue she's asked me to help her solve first is image organization.  At first, I told her to simply create a folder/sub-folder structure on her laptop and copy the image files (.gif, .jpeg, .dst, etc.) into aptly named folders.  However, she's purchased thousands of images that are not in a single folder.  Some of the image "packs" that she's purchased download into a hierarchy of multiple folders and subfolders.  She's looking for something that she can open up and see a thumbnails of the images so she can quickly scan through them to find the image that she wants.  Right now, I'm thinking that we could build the image library folder and sub-folder hierarchy, and could take all those images from the original downloads and copy them to where she can see them by looking through her folders.  We could use the search function in Finder to find all images by keyword no matter what sub-folder they were in, but the keyword would have to be in the name of the file.  I'm thinking that before we do all that, we should find software that can also allow her to tag images and allow her to search or filter her image library in more robust ways.  This latter description of searching and filtering is more than Finder can do.  I've started searching for software that has a little more functionality to do that, but I'm not sure what the best path to take is. 

Here's one more consideration.  If the software could also allow us to indicate links to the original download file, that would be great.  If not, we can get around that and make sure we have a "library of downloads" that is kept somewhere, we could identify where (and when) the image was downloaded. 

The ultimate goal is for me to define a process for her to download images files, tag them, then file them (save them) into her library, but allowing a tie-back to the original downloaded file set.  I have seen that mysewnet has a library that she can add her own images too.  Maybe the answer is as simple as doing it there.

Would anybody like to share what they do today?  And thanks!