Does this work on the stuff in your Poser content? I bought a ton of items in the bigg legacy sale a while back and when it installed it was an absolute mess, 70% of the files ended up in the materials category regardless if they were poses, props, FIGURES etc. I've been thinking about manually reorganizing the files but didn't want to mess up the links, if this works for everything then it looks like I can just group favorite sets together and leave the file structure alone :)
Default should not be !Default, and should not have a U (for user) on the icon. If you go to Edit>Preferences>Content and check Show Hidden Vendor Categorisations do you then see the full list?
No there is something wrong. You may need to submit a bug report. Here is what mine looks like. I have no problem adding a category to my own categories that has the same name as the Daz Studio categories. The only time I ever get an error with that error is if I already have a sub category in the Categories list. You don't have any categories in that list so its not a duplicate. Doesn't matter what the Daz Studio Formats and Poser Formats have in them, they are separate
Does this work on the stuff in your Poser content? I bought a ton of items in the bigg legacy sale a while back and when it installed it was an absolute mess, 70% of the files ended up in the materials category regardless if they were poses, props, FIGURES etc. I've been thinking about manually reorganizing the files but didn't want to mess up the links, if this works for everything then it looks like I can just group favorite sets together and leave the file structure alone :)
@brugan Yes it does work on the poser content. You are not moving files per se, you are simply creating a category structure of links to the product library.
No there is something wrong. You may need to submit a bug report. Here is what mine looks like. I have no problem adding a category to my own categories that has the same name as the Daz Studio categories. The only time I ever get an error with that error is if I already have a sub category in the Categories list. You don't have any categories in that list so its not a duplicate. Doesn't matter what the Daz Studio Formats and Poser Formats have in them, they are separate
Yup I expected it to be a bug. I have been categorizing in earlier versions of Studio and this never happened to me. I'm gonna try a few other things before I reach for DAZ support.
Thanks anyway for you wanting to help. I really appreciate it.
Default should not be !Default, and should not have a U (for user) on the icon. If you go to Edit>Preferences>Content and check Show Hidden Vendor Categorisations do you then see the full list?
Nope. Doesn't change anything.
Edit: I did a reset of the database and so far i can see this solved the problem. Thus rises again the question on how far I can trust the database even if it is a PostGreSQL database. I only play with DAZ Connect and somehow it got corrupted. I wonder why.
I only use DIM myself but we all have our own preferences. I do know that occasionally, the link to the files in my categories will disappear from several items. Its usually not many and not usually the same items. Relinking usually takes care of it. Annoying but not enough to be bothered about at the moment.
I export my catagories after every major addition (like several items) so that I can restore quickly if anything goes wrong. But I am still catagorising in 4.8 not 4.9 Beta
I export my catagories after every major addition (like several items) so that I can restore quickly if anything goes wrong. But I am still catagorising in 4.8 not 4.9 Beta
I have 4.8 on the laptop and 4.9 on the pc. They are slightly different. I won't give up my 4.8 with its lovely blue bars for finding content. I load stuff on the laptop first then follow the blue bars so I can find it on my pc lol.
Thank you so much for posting this. I am starting this tonight and hopefully won't give you cause to regret that you made the post, because I have questions and no idea what I'm doing. lol
1st thing. I have a category made and sub categories done for example characters - g3f - clothing
So now how do I get the clothing to show up in there????
Thank you so much for posting this. I am starting this tonight and hopefully won't give you cause to regret that you made the post, because I have questions and no idea what I'm doing. lol
1st thing. I have a category made and sub categories done for example characters - g3f - clothing
So now how do I get the clothing to show up in there????
Naviage to the clothing you want to add to that folder. Most G3F clothing will be under "People">>"Genesis 3 People">>"Clothing".
To add a single clothing item: Right click on the item icon and choose "Categorize" then navigate to the folder you want it in and put a check mark by that folder. Then hit accept.
To add an entire clothing folder: Right click on the folder and choose "Create a Category from">>"Selected Folder and Sub-Folders" then navigate to the folder you want to put it in and highlight the folder. Then hit accept.
You should then have those clothing items in your custom category. My advice is to just start with categorizing just your favorite/most used items. You can then later categorize your entire library if you're so inclined. :)
Thank you. I went though the products alphabetical and got everything into categories that way. Now I need to categorize my freebies. I want to keep them separate because you can't use most of them in commercial renders. I was thinking of just having a freebie categories in each of my existing sub categories. Like People-g3F-Hair-Freebies???? How do the rest of you deal with freebies when categorizing?
I categegorize my freebies in the same way that I categorize paid for content. Most of the freebies I have are fine for commercial use, I don't tend to pick up any that are for private use only. And i have a TON of freebies. So if its clothing for Victoria 4 it goes under the appropriate clothing tab. So it might go under People/Victoria 4/Clothing/Outfits/Fantasy Medieval/Name of clothing item. I also will put items in multiple categories for kit bashing. So an outfit would go into the aforementioned category, then I would also part out the set, the boots would go into People/Victoria 4/Clothing/Boots& Shoes/name of boots or shoes. The same with a belt, cape, jacket, jewelry etc. The whole outfit goes into one spot then the different items in the outfit go to a second folder as well. So If I want to find boots for something I go straight to the boots folder and have all 50 sets of boots right there so I don't have to go through 50 outfits looking for the right pair.
And yes, I am a bit ocd when it comes to organizing my content lol.
Well, I've begun the process of categorizing all my stuff. Even for more than 2500 products, it is rather easy to do because I didn't install anything new since I began. I will install the stuff I bought recently in the DAZ store or elsewhere when everything will be categorized. In the process I discovered some products I didn't even remember buying :)
I have about 20 products waiting for install but how will I know where everything goes? In earlier versions of Studio the new or changed directories were highlighted. After categorizing stuff I marked everything as seen and the highlighting was gone. In Studio's latest version (4.9) nothing gets highlighted and I can't mark my new stuff as seen after categorizing it. How do you handle new stuff?
With lots of tearing out of one's hair and teeth gnashing. I hate hate hate that the beautiful blue, new product bar is gone. So much that I have not upgraded my laptop fro 4.8 specifically so I can load my new content on the laptop and find my stuff so I can categorize it without losing my mind trying to find it. If you don't have that solution you can go to dim and pull up the product and right click to show installed files. That will give you an idea of where its at. For content from other places I just pull up the installation file and follow the folder tree.
With lots of tearing out of one's hair and teeth gnashing. I hate hate hate that the beautiful blue, new product bar is gone. So much that I have not upgraded my laptop fro 4.8 specifically so I can load my new content on the laptop and find my stuff so I can categorize it without losing my mind trying to find it. If you don't have that solution you can go to dim and pull up the product and right click to show installed files. That will give you an idea of where its at. For content from other places I just pull up the installation file and follow the folder tree.
Hi, Ice Dragon Art - I've reached the point where the number of products I have installed is so large that they are getting really hard to find, so I'd like to try doing my own categories too. I noticed you said you had DS4.8 and DS4.9 on different machines - do you categorise in DS4.8 and then copy the user data over, or the other way round?
I ask because I tried exporting User Data from 4.9.3.166 Beta and got an absolutely massive file (24 MB) with lots of entries I hadn't altered in any way from the metadata installed through DIM. When I export from DS4.6 I get a neat little file (120 KB) with just those few user entries I've created so far.
I thought so :-( I don't use DIM anymore except for software updates. I'll have to find another way to find newly installed stuff.
Use Windows Explorer with files and folders sorted by Date Modified.
Thanks, that is exactly what I have in mind. I'm just writing a little script that will do that for me so I just know what new files were added in the directories under watch.
Melaniel what I've been doing is, I set up my laptop next to my pc and because 4.8 still has the new content blue bar, I follow those and categorize both the pc and the laptop at the same time. When I first started, I simply started at the top of my content library and just worked my way through it pretty much in order. Its a long process but was worth every single minute of it lol. If someone came up with a quicker way I am all for it!
I've have to enable stuff (in effect allowing DRM onto my system).
This is what has put me off it. And will continue to put me off.
If you've installed 4.9 you already have; the database, as far as I know, has nothing to do directly with the decryption of DRM encumbered content. It (the database) has been around for at least the past two minor versions of DAZ Studio and has primarily been focused on metadata for smart content.
not if you uninstall SQL.
The database isn't what communicates with the DAZ servers to authenticate your ownership of the encrypted content.
It stores information; it's like a big black hole.
... I've no idea what it does, so out it goes. I'm presuming I could check it out with something like phpMyAdmin or mySQL - well more likely mySQL, but I have other things to do.
As it is now, uninstalled, I don't have to bother.
Default should not be !Default, and should not have a U (for user) on the icon. If you go to Edit>Preferences>Content and check Show Hidden Vendor Categorisations do you then see the full list?
Nope. Doesn't change anything.
Edit: I did a reset of the database and so far i can see this solved the problem. Thus rises again the question on how far I can trust the database even if it is a PostGreSQL database. I only play with DAZ Connect and somehow it got corrupted. I wonder why.
Default should not be !Default, and should not have a U (for user) on the icon. If you go to Edit>Preferences>Content and check Show Hidden Vendor Categorisations do you then see the full list?
Nope. Doesn't change anything.
Edit: I did a reset of the database and so far i can see this solved the problem. Thus rises again the question on how far I can trust the database even if it is a PostGreSQL database. I only play with DAZ Connect and somehow it got corrupted. I wonder why.
This is one reason I don't let it on my system.
Geek at play here :) I like the new and shiny stuff and always try to get the best out of it. IMO DAZ was rather sloppy when introducing Studio 4.9 but there is nothing that can't be dealt with at a reasonable cost :) As for categorizing in the content tab I'm still not sure DAZ will keep that feature in Studio's next releases as it needs some work from the end user.
I haven't heard of any plans to get rid of the categorizing ability. Lots of people are asking for the blue bars to come back though. If the blue bars came back I would upgrade my laptop to the current version. I think a LOT of users would be very upset if they did away with the ability to categorize
Melaniel what I've been doing is, I set up my laptop next to my pc and because 4.8 still has the new content blue bar, I follow those and categorize both the pc and the laptop at the same time. When I first started, I simply started at the top of my content library and just worked my way through it pretty much in order. Its a long process but was worth every single minute of it lol. If someone came up with a quicker way I am all for it!
Ah, so you effectively do it twice. OK, thanks. I'll probably stick with doing it on DS4.6 and letting DS4.9 get the "benefit" of that.
Melaniel what I've been doing is, I set up my laptop next to my pc and because 4.8 still has the new content blue bar, I follow those and categorize both the pc and the laptop at the same time. When I first started, I simply started at the top of my content library and just worked my way through it pretty much in order. Its a long process but was worth every single minute of it lol. If someone came up with a quicker way I am all for it!
Ah, so you effectively do it twice. OK, thanks. I'll probably stick with doing it on DS4.6 and letting DS4.9 get the "benefit" of that.
Exactly. Plus, I take the laptop camping so if its raining or whatever and we can't really be outside, I can work on stuff. Even without internet, I can at least put scenes together and render. I also take it to work, if its super slow and everything is done I can get a scene set up and render as well without having to load anything on my work computer. Not that my boss would care, but I doubt the work computer could handle much anyway.
You could use onenote to very quickly create screen shots. I use it when I am assembly products for a project. It takes me a few seconds to add the screen shot to the onenote. Then I can search across all my onenote notebooks for both my personal and school accounts. It makes it great to find what you need again.
Just FYI - I tried to get organized last night by running content maint (export user data, refresh db, followed by re-import of metadata).
From my experience, I'd have to warn people AGAINST doing this. If you have a bunch of older content installed via DIM, it creates dupe products (one for daz, one for poser) and doesn't link the files to the products, etc.
It was a mess.
Fixed it by refreshing again and finding a right-click option in DIM to reimport metadata. That one worked great for me (as opposed to the one inside daz studio).
So, I'm back to square one...wanting to organize my older and 3rd party (e.g., rendo) content. Guess I'll start reading all the threads on creating your own metadata. I REALLY wish there were a product that could automate this somehow, because I know if I spend time doing this, I'll accidentially refresh one day without exporting my user data and lose everything. :)
Comments
Thanks for the advice Diva!
Does this work on the stuff in your Poser content? I bought a ton of items in the bigg legacy sale a while back and when it installed it was an absolute mess, 70% of the files ended up in the materials category regardless if they were poses, props, FIGURES etc. I've been thinking about manually reorganizing the files but didn't want to mess up the links, if this works for everything then it looks like I can just group favorite sets together and leave the file structure alone :)
Default should not be !Default, and should not have a U (for user) on the icon. If you go to Edit>Preferences>Content and check Show Hidden Vendor Categorisations do you then see the full list?
No there is something wrong. You may need to submit a bug report. Here is what mine looks like. I have no problem adding a category to my own categories that has the same name as the Daz Studio categories. The only time I ever get an error with that error is if I already have a sub category in the Categories list. You don't have any categories in that list so its not a duplicate. Doesn't matter what the Daz Studio Formats and Poser Formats have in them, they are separate
@brugan Yes it does work on the poser content. You are not moving files per se, you are simply creating a category structure of links to the product library.
And Richard is right (he always is lol) my Default category does not have an exlamation point or the U on it.
Yup I expected it to be a bug. I have been categorizing in earlier versions of Studio and this never happened to me. I'm gonna try a few other things before I reach for DAZ support.
Thanks anyway for you wanting to help. I really appreciate it.
Nope. Doesn't change anything.
Edit: I did a reset of the database and so far i can see this solved the problem. Thus rises again the question on how far I can trust the database even if it is a PostGreSQL database. I only play with DAZ Connect and somehow it got corrupted. I wonder why.
I only use DIM myself but we all have our own preferences. I do know that occasionally, the link to the files in my categories will disappear from several items. Its usually not many and not usually the same items. Relinking usually takes care of it. Annoying but not enough to be bothered about at the moment.
And I'm glad you got it somewhat sorted!
I export my catagories after every major addition (like several items) so that I can restore quickly if anything goes wrong. But I am still catagorising in 4.8 not 4.9 Beta
I have 4.8 on the laptop and 4.9 on the pc. They are slightly different. I won't give up my 4.8 with its lovely blue bars for finding content. I load stuff on the laptop first then follow the blue bars so I can find it on my pc lol.
Thank you so much for posting this. I am starting this tonight and hopefully won't give you cause to regret that you made the post, because I have questions and no idea what I'm doing. lol
1st thing. I have a category made and sub categories done for example characters - g3f - clothing
So now how do I get the clothing to show up in there????
Naviage to the clothing you want to add to that folder. Most G3F clothing will be under "People">>"Genesis 3 People">>"Clothing".
To add a single clothing item: Right click on the item icon and choose "Categorize" then navigate to the folder you want it in and put a check mark by that folder. Then hit accept.
To add an entire clothing folder: Right click on the folder and choose "Create a Category from">>"Selected Folder and Sub-Folders" then navigate to the folder you want to put it in and highlight the folder. Then hit accept.
You should then have those clothing items in your custom category. My advice is to just start with categorizing just your favorite/most used items. You can then later categorize your entire library if you're so inclined. :)
Thank you. I went though the products alphabetical and got everything into categories that way. Now I need to categorize my freebies. I want to keep them separate because you can't use most of them in commercial renders. I was thinking of just having a freebie categories in each of my existing sub categories. Like People-g3F-Hair-Freebies???? How do the rest of you deal with freebies when categorizing?
I categegorize my freebies in the same way that I categorize paid for content. Most of the freebies I have are fine for commercial use, I don't tend to pick up any that are for private use only. And i have a TON of freebies. So if its clothing for Victoria 4 it goes under the appropriate clothing tab. So it might go under People/Victoria 4/Clothing/Outfits/Fantasy Medieval/Name of clothing item. I also will put items in multiple categories for kit bashing. So an outfit would go into the aforementioned category, then I would also part out the set, the boots would go into People/Victoria 4/Clothing/Boots& Shoes/name of boots or shoes. The same with a belt, cape, jacket, jewelry etc. The whole outfit goes into one spot then the different items in the outfit go to a second folder as well. So If I want to find boots for something I go straight to the boots folder and have all 50 sets of boots right there so I don't have to go through 50 outfits looking for the right pair.
And yes, I am a bit ocd when it comes to organizing my content lol.
Well, I've begun the process of categorizing all my stuff. Even for more than 2500 products, it is rather easy to do because I didn't install anything new since I began. I will install the stuff I bought recently in the DAZ store or elsewhere when everything will be categorized. In the process I discovered some products I didn't even remember buying :)
I have about 20 products waiting for install but how will I know where everything goes? In earlier versions of Studio the new or changed directories were highlighted. After categorizing stuff I marked everything as seen and the highlighting was gone. In Studio's latest version (4.9) nothing gets highlighted and I can't mark my new stuff as seen after categorizing it. How do you handle new stuff?
With lots of tearing out of one's hair and teeth gnashing. I hate hate hate that the beautiful blue, new product bar is gone. So much that I have not upgraded my laptop fro 4.8 specifically so I can load my new content on the laptop and find my stuff so I can categorize it without losing my mind trying to find it. If you don't have that solution you can go to dim and pull up the product and right click to show installed files. That will give you an idea of where its at. For content from other places I just pull up the installation file and follow the folder tree.
I thought so :-( I don't use DIM anymore except for software updates. I'll have to find another way to find newly installed stuff.
Hi, Ice Dragon Art - I've reached the point where the number of products I have installed is so large that they are getting really hard to find, so I'd like to try doing my own categories too. I noticed you said you had DS4.8 and DS4.9 on different machines - do you categorise in DS4.8 and then copy the user data over, or the other way round?
I ask because I tried exporting User Data from 4.9.3.166 Beta and got an absolutely massive file (24 MB) with lots of entries I hadn't altered in any way from the metadata installed through DIM. When I export from DS4.6 I get a neat little file (120 KB) with just those few user entries I've created so far.
Use Windows Explorer with files and folders sorted by Date Modified.
Thanks, that is exactly what I have in mind. I'm just writing a little script that will do that for me so I just know what new files were added in the directories under watch.
Melaniel what I've been doing is, I set up my laptop next to my pc and because 4.8 still has the new content blue bar, I follow those and categorize both the pc and the laptop at the same time. When I first started, I simply started at the top of my content library and just worked my way through it pretty much in order. Its a long process but was worth every single minute of it lol. If someone came up with a quicker way I am all for it!
It stores information; it's like a big black hole.
... I've no idea what it does, so out it goes. I'm presuming I could check it out with something like phpMyAdmin or mySQL - well more likely mySQL, but I have other things to do.
As it is now, uninstalled, I don't have to bother.
This is one reason I don't let it on my system.
Geek at play here :) I like the new and shiny stuff and always try to get the best out of it. IMO DAZ was rather sloppy when introducing Studio 4.9 but there is nothing that can't be dealt with at a reasonable cost :) As for categorizing in the content tab I'm still not sure DAZ will keep that feature in Studio's next releases as it needs some work from the end user.
I haven't heard of any plans to get rid of the categorizing ability. Lots of people are asking for the blue bars to come back though. If the blue bars came back I would upgrade my laptop to the current version. I think a LOT of users would be very upset if they did away with the ability to categorize
Ah, so you effectively do it twice. OK, thanks. I'll probably stick with doing it on DS4.6 and letting DS4.9 get the "benefit" of that.
Exactly. Plus, I take the laptop camping so if its raining or whatever and we can't really be outside, I can work on stuff. Even without internet, I can at least put scenes together and render. I also take it to work, if its super slow and everything is done I can get a scene set up and render as well without having to load anything on my work computer. Not that my boss would care, but I doubt the work computer could handle much anyway.
You could use onenote to very quickly create screen shots. I use it when I am assembly products for a project. It takes me a few seconds to add the screen shot to the onenote. Then I can search across all my onenote notebooks for both my personal and school accounts. It makes it great to find what you need again.
Just FYI - I tried to get organized last night by running content maint (export user data, refresh db, followed by re-import of metadata).
From my experience, I'd have to warn people AGAINST doing this. If you have a bunch of older content installed via DIM, it creates dupe products (one for daz, one for poser) and doesn't link the files to the products, etc.
It was a mess.
Fixed it by refreshing again and finding a right-click option in DIM to reimport metadata. That one worked great for me (as opposed to the one inside daz studio).
So, I'm back to square one...wanting to organize my older and 3rd party (e.g., rendo) content. Guess I'll start reading all the threads on creating your own metadata. I REALLY wish there were a product that could automate this somehow, because I know if I spend time doing this, I'll accidentially refresh one day without exporting my user data and lose everything. :)