My download folder is a disaster, and I want to fix that so after I reset my game I don't end up with the issue I've been having. I'm just not sure what the best method to organizing things is. I had been grouping things by creator name, but.... MESS! Should I do by EP? or is there something less obvious that works?

I used to sort halfway by creator name, and mixed in at least 3-4 systems as well, so things got out of hand. My new system is based more on categories, like CAS, Buy, Build, Hacks, etc. and then having the creator or set name as subfolders. That way it's a bit easier to keep track, and it's also easier to find problem files in that particular category. I've also reduced subfoldering to a max of 3, both for help with loading and to not make file paths too long, but also because I'd rather just click through 1-3 folders than 10 to find a file. I made separate folders with similar naming for CC I've created, so it's easier to find those too. I also made some Theme folders for seasonal CC like Christmas and Halloween, so I can take them out and put them back in as needed, because there's no point in having tons of themed CC cluttering up my game when I only use it once in a while.

I haven't put the new system to test yet (working on fixing my game first) but it is so much easier to find stuff in there while I'm sorting and recategorizing stuff (because I've done that, too - I want items and clothes to be in more logical places ingame. I've also removed a lot of old CC I either never used, which helped a lot on the amount.

By EP is not very practical at all, because some CC is dependent on more than one EP, and most is plain basegame.

I Organize first by General Category: for me I use Building, Business Ranks, Careers, clothes_AllAboutStyle, clothes_CatOfEvilGenius, [lots of other clothes folders, qutite a few other catagories], Hair, Object Mods, Tested Mods, Vehicles, z-default_replacement-clothes, {some other folders of this type}, zz-default replacements_etc {last folder}

Note: I like my clothes separated out and I have a lot of others as well, Pretty much what I like goes in this 1st level of the folder structure, last folders are several default_replacement folders.

Inside each of the CategoryLevel Folders I have subfolders, organized by Creator or Site.

So Category then Creator: Like .../Downloads/Tested Mods/-MATY Mods/ [then individual package files]

I do not have more than 3 levels, I try to keep it at two levels most of the time.

I organize by type of item with subfolders but not too deeply, mine are rather spread out. deeply subfoldered makes loading slower.
You want to pick a system that will help you know where things are. A lot of people like by creator but I can't remember what each creator makes except a few.

Accessories (could be in Body Shop but I have it out at the moment as I am always reorganizing) Aquarium (because sometimes I add in lot types) Baby and Toddler (because I have a lot of CC for those age ranges) baby Clothes and accessories (another folder because baby clothes need to be shallow and I want them separate from furniture and toys etc) Bank (lot type) Bathroom, Beach, Body Shop(makeup, facial hair, non default face templates, face sliders, eyebrows) Build with all build items like (windows, doors, fence, columns) etc. Doesn't include terrain paints, garden, walls or floors I have those as separate folders) That is my current A and B. I have about 11 gigs of content compressed, it was 14.

Clothes I prefer to set out like Clothes_AF Clothes_Tod, Clothes_EF etc.
Defaults are in a default folder, hacks are in a Mods folder.

The important thing to remember when organizing is: What you're going to do when you're looking for something. If you file dress patterns by design company, but search through them when you want something that's a certain size, you might as well have not filed them in any order at all.

So, what are the qualities you seize on most often when you want to find a piece of CC in your downloads folder? That's where you get your main organizing principle. I think for most people in Sims CC the catalog category is the prime, but if for you it's style or creator, you start there. The fewer subfolders and folders you have the better (decreases loading times), but you'll need a few, and that will be governed by how much custom content you have.

So, my Retro game set up has less CC than my Modern game set up. The Retro Cc is organized only by General Catalog Category - one file, no subfolders, for Clothes, Comfort, Surfaces, etc. The Modern CC is organized by Catalog Category, so there's Clothes with subfolders for Tops, Bottoms, FullBody, Formal, etc.; and series of related folders for Surfaces: SurfaceCoffee, SurfaceCounter,SurfaceDesk, SurfaceDining, SurfaceEnd, SurfaceMisc. Some categories have further break-out folders for things that I collect absurd amounts of, so there's a DecoBird and a Books folder.

When troubleshooting time comes, it pays to have your Defaults and your Mods all in one folder together. And you should have a Do Not Remove folder for any CC that creates NPCs and the truly essential mods.

And always remember: The simpler you make your system, the easier it will be to use and to maintain! Don't get sucked into an organization frenzy and start creating complicated systems that will just be annoying when you've been on a download spree and want to get everything into the Downloads folder so you can start playing with it.

I distinguish between mods, build mode, eyes, glasses/accessoires, hair, outfits, skins & face, items and item recolours. Just like Peni Griffin suggests, I organise it like that in order to find everything back when I go looking for it.

- My mods are divided further into maps which refer to the site I got it from (MTS, MATY, Simbology, etc.). For MTS, I organise the mods by creator if I have downloaded multiple mods from one person. I don't know whether that's helpful when looking for the mod, but then we always got the search button It certainly helps reminding me what the mod was about. Lastly, mods that need to load after another one in the main folder (though I don't know whether that works: people always say mods load after another alphabetically, I don't know whether that means regardless of folder or not).
- Hair and outfits are divided further into male, female and unisex downloads. Mainly because these folders are starting to explode I was thinking about dividing it even further, but it's probably best to keep it as simple as possible.
- I separated the items from the item recolours. That's a little arbitrary, I mean: what about a custom set of items that have been recoloured by another creator? I usually put these recolours in the 'items' folder and solely use the 'item recolour' folder for recoloured Maxis furniture. I could group them together, but this separation helps me remember what's new and what's a recolour of 'old' stuff.

Whatever structure you decide on -- it really comes down to personal preference -- the fewer the folders, the better. If you need to find a specific thing for some reason, you can run a search on even a completely un-subfoldered Downloads folder. If you use wildcards in your search string so that it'll bring up all files with a certain string of letters/numbers in it, odds are you'll find what you're looking for pretty easily even from amongst tens of thousands of files. ...Unless, of course, you have lots of obscurely-named files or lots of those that the game's native installer has mangled into a random alphanumeric string. You'd need to rename all of those so that they could be searched effectively. But my feeling is that if you're going to spend a bunch of time screwing around with CC files, you're better off spending that time renaming files so that they make sense and so that you can run searches on them easily to find what you want.

......But this could all be because I'm severely right-brained and "organization" just makes me go, "Huh? I can't FIND ANYHING!!!" Or maybe I'm just thinking more like a computer than a person. Whatever.

Me, I'm thinking about just dumping everything except hacks loose in the Downloads folder. I'd need to do some renaming for searching purposes because I've still got a number of those stupid, useless, song-lyric file names that were popular on GOS in the mid/late-2000s, and some of those I don't even know what they are because the file names are so obscure. And I do have a bunch of walls/floors/terrain paints with useless Homecrafter-generated filenames that might (or might not; I don't often need to search for walls/floors/paints in my files) need to be figured out and renamed...or just dumped. Anyway, I'm betting that if I do that, stuff will load more quickly, both in terms of overall game-loading time and loading in "catalog" screens in CAS and build/buy. The question is cost vs. benefit. As in, "Will the gain be worth the effort I'd need to put in?" That, I don't know. And in any case, I'd still need to keep the hacks subfoldered because they're subfoldered to keep them in a very particular load order, not for "organization," but the rest? I'm seriously thinking about un-foldering all of it.

My Downloads folder is pretty much divided into four main folders: CAS, Buy/Build, Defaults and Hacks - this is mostly so that if I feel like building or decorating I can just leave the buy/build folder in, if I want to do bodyshop stuff then the CAS folder remains in the downloads and others are sitting elsewhere during that for bit faster loading times. Under those "main folders" I have very basic structure for example CAS is just: accessories, hairs, clothes, eyes, makeup, eyebrows, facial hair, Sims, skins. I never saw any need to try sorting them by creators or anything, that would only make it confusing to me since I care about the content type not about who made it.

^^ That's a good point. That's something I address more with separate user accounts on my computer, though. Like, I have a "Building" user account where I just...build stuff. It has Simless copies of neighborhoods that I play so that I can see how the new lot will look in the "real" neighborhood and stuff like that. That account's Downloads has only neighborhood deco and build/buy stuff in it, no mods or CAS stuff or defaults (except terrain defaults) or anything. If I was a person who made Sims, I'd probably do something similar and have a user account with only CAS stuff in it. I do it this way rather than moving folders in and out because 1) I have plenty of storage space on this machine so I'm not worried about multiple copies of the same stuff on it and 2) I'm one of those people who will load up the game...and then realize that I didn't put the right folder in, so I'd have to exit and reload and be very annoyed with myself.

A naming tip if you're the "everyting in one folder" kind of person and want things to be properly organized is to organize them by filename. Personally I don't rename other files (except if there's an unacceptable amount of undesirable characters), because that sometimes makes me confused if I go looking for them. I do however make sure to organize the CC I've made with filenames. They sort neatly after creator name, then set or type name, then item name (if there is one), then "REC" and the recolor name, or MESH (because then the mesh always sorts on top of the rest of the set, instead of somewhere else). This makes everything sort so neatly I've been able to put most of my newer and properly named files into one single folder, and I can still find what I'm looking for. I've lately gone through a lot of my older files to fix up the file names and categorizing them properly. I've probably made somewhere around 5000 files or so over the years (I've stopped counting, may be much more), so if I didn't name them properly I'd never find anything.

The files would look something like this (with a few variations depending on item)
Theraven_InfAcc_BearHat_MESH
Theraven_InfAcc_BearHat_REC-DotsGreen
Theraven_InfAcc_BearHat_REC-Purple
Theraven_InfAcc_BearHat_REC-StripesPink
(Creator_Type/Set_ItemName_MESH/REC-Pattern/Color)

I always prefer having creator names in the front of the filename, because then you know who made them, and they sort more neatly after creator. I tend to remember better which creator made something than any other info, so this works quite well for me.

Do you realize the brackets ( ) are special characters that need removing? I mean they can be left, but special characters are known things that increase loading time so I go through and remove them.

I believe brackets showcase an example and are not actually used.

The parenthesis above are not meant to be in the filename, they're just regular grammar parenthesises to show the composition of the filenames above

I used brackets when I first started creating, but haven't for a while. Some of my older files have them, but I'm working on editing them out and have even reupladed some of my old files with fixed names and some recategorizing and resource fixing (there are a LOT of files to edit, because I wasn't aware of this issue until around 2013 or thereabout, and managed to make a lot of files before then).

So yeah - brackets [ ] and parenthesises ( ) and whatever these {} are called are not recommended to use. Neither are all the other special characters, like &%#@$?:.,;"~ and so forth, or spaces in file names, or special tingamabobs over letters for other languages (my examples didn't show properly, which is an indication these special letters don't work very well for forums either). You should also avoid extra punctuation, because there have been cases where the file becomes useless, since it thinks everything after the . is a file extension (so don't name your files "pants.greenshoes.3.package", or "[pants]blue.Jacket ~ {green.shoes & socks} .package" or some variation of this).

Keeping to Aa-Zz and 0-9 and _ and - is the safest.

Also keep file and folder names short enough so they don't go over the file path character limit. I think it's 260 characters (all the way from C:\Users\USER\Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Downloads --> , or even longer if you have the UC). Special characters may shorten this down further, since they occasionally show with a code instead of the actual character in the file path.

Must have been an older download I put in the other day then as it did have brackets. I think I wasn't expecting them as I had probably got use to your downloads not having them. I use bulk renamer.
I can imagine how much work it all is. :/

I'm doing a lot of edits to the files anyway (some deco is placed all over the map so I'm placing them show up somewhere sensible, I'm adding shift and quartertile, removing the "tiny object" data for large items, and adding it for small items, adding or removing categories for clothes, adding hovertext, etc.), so the bulk renamer would only manage to do a tiny part of the job anyway. I have used one to test it out, but had some issues with it (I seem to remember my antivirus kept freaking our for some reason) so I went back to manual. I do have one that adds the filename to the hovertext, but other than that Copy/Pasta is pretty useful, and so is properly renaming from the start.

Jo, I've added a new comment for the files I have changed, so they should be easy to spot in case you wonder whether they're updated or not.

As for organizing tips, I myself use Jessa's setup (on my backup folders, the actual folder that the game uses has no sub-folders) with small modifications; for example: CAS - Clothing - Female - Adult - Everyday - Outfits, or Buy Mode - Comfort - Beds, so basically just like in-game categories. Inside them content is organized in folders named Site - Creator - Name of CC. I have a backup folder with original files (as made and named by creator) organized, and a backup folder with those files merged and renamed (with no special characters) and I use those in my Download folder.

TheRaven's naming convention is pretty much what I use, too, both for renaming files and for making file names for the stuff I make. My format for the latter is always iCad_ShortDescriptionOfThing_RecolorName.package. No spaces, no special characters, and as short as I can make them. This is because I'm a relic of the time when file names could only be eight characters long, max, and only capital letters, numbers, and underscores were allowed. And monochrome monitors, whee!

That said, I don't usually rename mesh files, at least not object meshes. This is because the majority of the creating I do is object retexturing/recoloring, and I generally include meshes in my uploads. I figure that if I don't rename the mesh files, there's less chance that I'll give a downloader a duplicate file. If I was smart and/or forward-thinking, I would've kept an archive of un-renamed copies of mesh files and then have renamed copies for my own use, but I didn't do that at the start, and it's probably too late to start now.

If I do unfolder, I'll probably still keep all meshes, for everything, in a folder together, just so that I can search that folder when I want to recolor something and have a shorter list of hits to look through than searching everything. So, I'd have a folder for hacks, one for meshes, and everything else loose in the downloads folder with short(ish) file names that make freakin' sense. It would be a yuuuuge project, though, and as I said I'm not sure the benefit would outweigh the effort I'd need to expend.

Thanks @simmer22 I tried using the shift tutorial to make some wall bookshelves shiftable but didn't find it very clear (pictures were too small I think) as I couldn't get it to work. I appreciate your updating.

^ Not sure if that works for bookshelves if they're cloned from tall ones, because shiftability seems to be a bit dependent on size, possibly the size of the original object (but I'm not sure). Anyway, see my last comment here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...d=1#post2122620 for even easier shiftability

I did see and use your comment when I tried the tutorial. It could be as you are saying what it is cloned from, the bookcase looked like a shelf but maybe because it's a bookcase it can't shift.

I should try it again with something else.

Try with a one-tile sculpture. Usually works fine with those.

I didn't read the whole thread to see what's suggested, but I organize mostly by themes by what I'm playing with. I do have a few general folders like MODS, DEFAULTS, etc, but otherwise, it's more like ZOMBIES, BETTERBABIES, CHURCHSTUFF, THEATER, CAMPING, TINYFOODSTAND... because usually I'm collecting CC for a certain project I'm working on, so it's easy to remember why I got that skating rink deco or library shelf or zombie skin and, also, if I start a new hood in a new game folder where I don't want zombies or a church or camping, I can just remove those whole folders and lighten the load for that game.