Organizing / Browsing images

[Aylorian]

Looking for recommendations on software to manage and browse directories of images.

Do most of you just manage images by having them loaded into your favorite mapping / drawing tool, or are you using separate software for it?

Finding my image directories unmanageable already....

[icosahedron]

I find Xnview useful. It's free.

http://www.xnview.com/

My main mapper imports to its own format for browsing, but I still need to manage and browse the common format images when I import and export.

[Ascension]

I have a dedicated folder for fantasy stuff. I break it down into art, maps, ideas, patterns, tuts, photos, etc. I then break down into further subsections like art/people and art/3d or maps/mine and maps/others or photos/places and photos/people. This way I can keep all images in one place and find them easily.

[Redrobes]

I use PSP which has a neat picture browser built in so its good enough that I dont feel the need to get any more complex about it.

You should definitely check out irfanview tho. Its free and is an image viewer and hit T and it does thumbnails. Its better than PSPs thumbs as irfanview is really good at everything it does but since I have to load that up especially and then find and open that again in PSP I dont use it.

In terms of organizing, for my camera photos I do them by year and date so I unload the camera into a new directory. For other pics then I have textures and similar directories but most of the images are in directories that relate to a job I am doing so if I do a map then it goes in with the map dir along with all the other creation files.

[Aylorian]

Thanks for the responses all.

I checked out XnView. The 'show all files (recursive)' option was exactly what I was looking for, allows me to view everything in a folder and all its sub directories. Seems pretty fast too - loaded up the entire CSUAC in a couple of minutes.

[Tiana]

I have a dedicated folder for fantasy stuff. I break it down into art, maps, ideas, patterns, tuts, photos, etc. I then break down into further subsections like art/people and art/3d or maps/mine and maps/others or photos/places and photos/people. This way I can keep all images in one place and find them easily.

Me too. I never liked alternate programs for image organization. I have

My Pictures (which is where unsorted pictures go) which breaks down into men, women, backgrounds, abstract, stock (which breaks down into men, women, group shots, backgrounds, textures, mine and a few folders of specific stock sets, like steampunk and whatnot), costumes, science fiction, fantasy, creatures and animals, anime and cartoons, sequencial art, several folders of fanart, tutorials, typeography, avatars, signatures and banners, maps, and one specifically for things related to my own work. My own art folder then breaks into several folders of references for characters, folders for art of locations, older artwork, my webcomics each have their own folder with subfolders for advertising and layered print sized files and web sized files and extra features... I haven't sorted my mapping stuff out from my character artwork, and other artwork, though, all my current 'art' just goes in one massive folder. Then I have a folder for my brushes and textures in Photoshop.

And it's still not sorted enough. Optimally there would be nothing in My Pictures and everything would be sorted neatly into its own folder.

So I manage images with Windows, and a lot of folders.

Fonts are a different story. I do have a font manager.