The best way to organize references both physical and digital?

[Costau D]

Anybody have some good advice and tips on how to organize your references so you don't have to sift through too much files and clippings? Even for the 3d artist, how do you organize your texture library? This would help out a lot, many thanks to anyone who replies.

There just has to be a better way than the way i do it. I always run into that one piece of reference that really doesn't have a place to go because it involves many categories etc.

[anjy]

I just organize my stuff by named folders and organize by large icon view for previews.

If you really want to be organized, you could have like Nature, and then in there, have Rocks, Trees, etc. And if an image crosses categories, put a copy or alias in multiple folders.

(When I'm browsing the internet, I save anything that is interesting or might be useful in the future, so I have thousands of files; most of which are actually unorganized. I just periodically browse my downloaded files...)

[Baron Impossible]

I wrote some quick code in PHP with a couple of MySQL tables; basically I save any image I want to my HD, go onto my script page and choose "upload"; it uploads all outstanding images, creates thumbnails and I can type keywords in against each image. I can then search for keywords and it brings back images by relevance. Pretty basic but effective. If you know a bit of scripting it saves hours (days!) of looking at folders and thumbnails. I've tagged about 3000 so far.

[jeremygordon89]

Figure out what types of references you want to collect. For example: figures, animals, architecture, landscapes, objects, food, individual anatomy, miscellaneous. Make folders for those references, and maybe even do sub-folders in those (Figures - Male, Female). That's what I usually do at least.