Organising my images

I know I often hear of people asking how to organise all their scrapbooking files as they get more and more.

I can't tell anyone what to do, but I think I'm finally happy with what I'm doing, so figured I might as well share.

I have a directory for all my scrapbooking components. Under that I have a series of folders for the different types.

alphas
elements
kits
other (brushes, overlays, that kind of thing)
papers
quick pages
word art

Inside those I have folders for each set of items. I name them by the designer's name and then the name of the kit or set.

eg. Lynn Grieveson - Island Winds
Gina Cabrera - Birtday Blitz Elements

I leave all the actual file names the same as the designer named them as they often have important information in the filename. (Besides, why would I want to do all the work to rename them all?)

I have been looking for some image album software to let me browse through everything to find what I want and I've found Microsoft Digital Image Suite Library to be the best for me.

This gives me easily viewable previews of .png files, which not everything does. (I couldn't get Picasa to do it, although there may be a way to make it work.) It keeps things sorted in my directory structure unless I choose to change it. I can set the edit function to go to the graphics programme of my choice rather than being stuck with the Image Suite Editor. It offers tags and labels etc that I haven't used yet because I'm happy with my directory structure at this point.

I used it in conjunction with Painshop Pro to do the Fearless layout and found it great. I can easily skim through all my folders to find what I want to use. The thumbnails are bigger than in PSP's browse function (and I can pull up a bigger one any time I like) and I can drag a file directly from there into PSP. It was also really easy to skim through again to do the credits. As each directory had the name of the designer and kit, it was all there for me to see easily.

So this is what's working for me. I don't know if it will be any help to anyone else but maybe there's something useful in here.