Tagging AND Categorizing? INPUT PLEASE!

[CrystalMarie]

Thank for all of you who have answered my many questions... I'm ready to start categorizing, but I had another question. Hopefully one of the last. This is a big one though.

Now I'm wondering... (In ACDSee now)... Why should I put (for example) a blue & white polkadot ribbon into a 'blue' folder, a 'ribbon' folder, a 'white' folder and a 'polka dots' folder, when I could just write 'blue ribbon white dots' in the tags and when I was doing a blue page and searched 'blue' it would come up with the blue ribbon... I wouldnt necessarily even need to look in my 'blue' folder because everything blue would have blue in the tag and would come up under a search right? So isnt it kind of pointless to both do tags and drag-n-drop categorizing? Wouldnt it make more sense to do one or the other? Does that make sense? What have you all found? A lot of the organizing styles had a lot of sub-folders, and it would be fun to be able to click a 'winter' folder and have everything for winter come up, but if its all tagged, (which would take less time since you can do all the tagging at one time, where dragging and dropping is much more time consuming, doing it one by one) everything that would be in the 'winter' folder would come up anyway in a search wouldnt it? Basically the same thing as looking in a 'winter' folder?

[maryjos]

I know this is a little late, but finding the style of organizing that works best for you can sometimes take a little experimentation. By folder do you mean a category (not a folder on your computer?) On my computer, I keep everything organized by type of kit (full kit, alpha, quickclick, etc.) then by webiste (DSP, etc.) then by designer. But I always leave the items in a kit together. I personally use the categories in ACDSee to get everything into some main category that relates to the item. For instance, a ribbon goes into a sub-category of "ribbon" under the main category of "notions" (which holds sub-cats like bows, ties, strings, beads, wires, stitching, etc.) I then add keywords for anything else that item might related to, be it color, style, event/holiday, etc. When I use the search feature, I have it set to search file names and keywords, so I just select the category to search in and add whatever additional words I'm searching on. This allows me to more easily find just ribbons for instance...or any notion (bow, ribbon, ricrac, etc.) that is blue or for "baby" more easily than just using keywords.

HTH