(From my mailbag...)
Hi. I'm new to machine embroidery and I have been downloading the free designs and I just adore this site. I decided to go ahead and get a subscription so I can support such a great site and get fantastic embroidery designs from. I am wondering the best way to save these files? Should I keep a zip folder and another for the open files? Keep under sections? Help appreciated.
Welcome! Glad you're here and I appreciate your support. :-)
Most people just download to their "my documents" area at first but soon realize that they can't find anything once they have a lot of designs. If you just download the designs from the ArtisticThreadWorks Design Library alone, you'll have over 13,000 designs to organize!
When faced with that many designs -- people start the quest for how to organize!
The main way people organize is by creating a folder for designs with subfolders for subject of the design. So it would look like this...
Embroidery-Designs
Angels
Alphabets
Aardvarks
...
Xylophones
Zebras
Then they move their designs into the appropriate folder. That's the simplest way to organize and covers most of the issues your likely to come up with. (Most - not all) If you want a list of folder names -- try starting with the list in our design library.
The two other frequent problems are questions about "who was the digitizer of this design?" and "what does the design look like?".
The reasons you'll want to know "who was the digitizer" are that you'll find some digitizers designs always sew out perfectly for you and others always have issues. It's nice to be able to identify which designs you can be sure will sew out well when choosing which one to use.
Another reason you'll want to know this is that all designs come with "legal strings attched". You are buying the right to use the design in a certain way. The "way" is specified in the digitizer's "Terms Of Use". Many designs allow for only non-commercial use. Others allow for any use - including commercial use - up to a certain number of sew-outs.
Quite often you can look at the design file name and tell instantly who the digitizer was. The ones from our site for example start with "AT", "ATG", "ATM", or "ATXS" followed by a series of 4 numbers. Designs from other digitizers use similar naming systems, so once you recognize the code in the beginning of the name, you'll know who the digitizer was.
When we first started, we named designs like this... "cat", "cat2", "cat3", "cat-with-mouse", etc. We quickly ran out of combinations, lost track of things like "is this dog #38 or #39 and "did I already name one christmas holly?" That's when we switched to a letter/number system and we suddenly understood why companies like Dakota Collectibles used numbers instead of names.
The other issue, "what does this design look like?" happens when you have a folder with 100 dog designs. You'll want to be able to easily see the designs to choose the one that best suits your project. That's where deisgn viewing software comes in handy. Take a look at www.embird.com for the most widely used program. It includes something called "Iconizer" that allows you to see what designs look like without opening them.
I would suggest you download the zip file into the folder it belongs in and then unzip it into the same folder. You might even make a sub-folder under each category folder that just says "zip" like this...
Embroidery-Designs
Angels
zips
Alphabets
zips
Aardvarks
zips
...
Xylophones
zips
Zebras
zips
And place the zip file into the subfolder after you unzip it. That way you'll instantly be able to see which ZIP files have not been unzipped yet.