Second Life Inventory Management: Another Go Through Folder

I will admit it… I have a problem. I love hunts, I love discounts, I love group gifts, I love freebies, let’s just face it… I love stuff! Love it so much that at the end of every night on SL I have an additional hundred, sometimes up to 300 unpacked items in my Inventory.

 Yeah that is a lot of items, let’s do the math, unpacked as you know there can be anywhere from 1- 20 items in a box. Let’s pick 10 as our average number items in a prim box to make this easy. If I unpack all my goodies at the end of the night I will have increased my inventory by 1,000 items easily or better yet, at the end of the week my inventory could be bulging at the seams with additional 10 thousand items.

Typically I don’t have time or the desire to unpack all those goodies.  But I got to have them right?!?! What I do, is at the end of the night I create a folder with the date as the title and take all the new open folders in my inventory and the unpacked boxes from my object folder and place them in the newly created day folder.  But as the woeful story goes, that does nothing to help me be more organized or reduce down the number of items in my inventory. It’s just like sweeping all the toys under your bed when your mother told you to clean your room, out of sight…but definitely not clean.

So I was sitting there with Serra the other night, bleary eyed watching a lucky chair waiting for my letter to show its cheery little face, pondering how to get my inventory under control.  When I remembered how Mar @ SL4Nowt always recommended doing it slow. Serra was crying her woes of overflowing management to me saying how she should just pick out ten boxes a night and just deal with them, no matter how much she just wants to cram them back into her “Go through Later” folder.  

Flipping open my “go through” folder I began looking at the million of items waiting for me to open them, try them on, picture them, upload into my wardrobe, move them over to a permanent spot in my category folders or delete them. I noticed I had a ton of builder items, house decorations, furniture items all mixed in with the clothing items I had gotten.  And I thought to myself it would be great if these were all separated by what type they were so when I wanted to find a clothing item, all this other crap wouldn’t be mixed in.  

That’s when it hit me; a mini epiphany...the night light went off in my head, I had a way to make my inventory seem less chaotic. I set to work instantly creating the following folder hierarchy:

1! Go Through

Ä0 S – Clothing

Ä0 S – Jewelry

Ä0 S – Shoes

Ä0 S – Hairs

Ä0 S – Skins/Make-ups/Shapes

Ä0 S – Building Tools

Ä0 S - Poses
Ä0 S - Misc

Ä0 UP – Home Items

Ä0 UP – Clothing

Ä0 UP – Jewelry

Ä0 UP – Shoes

Ä0 UP – Hairs

Ä0 UP – Skins/Make-ups/Shapes

Ä0 UP –Building Tools

Ä0 UP – Home Items

Ä0 UP –Poses

Ä0 UP –Misc 

*** The “S” stands for sort, and the “UP” stands for unpack.

With this in place I opened two inventory windows one where I could see my newly created folders and the other I opened up my object folder. Then I quickly went through my object folder and sorted all the unpacked newly acquired goodies into the appropriate “UP” folders by what I thought were in them. Some of those titles were iffy on exactly what I had so I also created a Misc folder.  Then I went to all the open folders at the bottom of my inventory and quickly sorted them into the “S” folders by what was in them. I did this for all my date folders too and before I knew it I had them all neatly sorted into their new homes and I had a better idea of what I needed to do in order to clean up my inventory better. Or at the least I had a better chance at finding that new goodie I wanted without having to dig through a million “go through” folders for it.

And now the next step is for me to go through my “UP” folders one at a time unpacking the items and moving those items to the “S” folders. I plan to then take the boxes I opened and archive them for backups. You can read more on archiving in one of my past articles here.

Then the final step is for me to go through the “S” folders, one at a time, trying on the items, deleting the ones I do not want to keep, take pictures and upload to my wardrobe then file in my category folders for a permanent home.

Still a ton of work to do, but I sure do feel more organized already. Give it a try, what harm can come from it?

Take care till the next post.

-Taliferrue