organizing many sketches

edited October 2017 in General

I'm starting to accumulate a lot of sketches now. Just wondering if anyone has any insights about their workflow or tips on how to keep them organized.

Comments

  • Throw them all in one big pile with cryptic names. Occasionally make the pile smaller by use of gasoline and fire.


    Actually, what I find helps the most is: First, I don't save any of the thousands of examples I've written for people over the years. Next, paid projects go in a paid projects folder. And games go in the games folder. Interesting static artwork in another folder, and animations of looping animations in a final folder.

    Gasoline and fire for anything else.

  • they get put in your sketchbook directory with unique names, that doesn't give much room for confusion, unless you call them things like 'sketch' or 'new_sketch'.

    and the single directory makes it easy to back them up. and it's easy enough to use git or svn for version control. what do you mean you aren't using version control?

  • edited October 2017
    1. break them into a few simple categories with subfolders
    2. give them long descriptive names, like LineGraphWithFlowChangingDirection or TimeDependentGameSkyline.

    Now that you've done that, assume that you will ignore it. later you will be in too much of a hurry to find that one things with color shifting insects you made 3 years ago. Was it under demos, or game-related, or listed under your color folder or your animation folder? You'll just use OS-level search!

    The long names will help you know your search found the right result, but to make the searching much easier: add a line or two of description in a comment block at the top of any sketch worth keeping.

  • I use 'save as' v_## for versioning. Maybe I should try git.

  • edited October 2017

    I have one folder for each letter of the alphabet (or most of them)

    There are the sketches with names like rain_3Da

    When there are many sketches to one topic I make a further (nested) subfolder that I write in Capitals with a - (example BALL_ or GRIDS_ or CAMERA_)

    my own bigger main projects are outside the alphabet subfolders (Chess, Turtle etc.)

    a few other folders are also here, like for documents for lessons learned _docu could be a name of this folder and for „empty“ sketches (folder _empty) to start a new sketch from (e.g. with only setup and draw or additionally usual input functions or additionally state system.

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