File Organization

As a designer it is important to have lots of tools at your disposal – stock photos, fonts, brushes, backgrounds, vector sets etc. Over time it’s easy to start to accumulate extra files you don’t really need and use. So I think it’s important once in awhile to go through your design tools and clean out files that you never use. You will save time in the long run as Photoshop and other programs will load faster and you will spend less time having to search through a million brushes, fonts and photos.

If you want to delete old brushes out of Photoshop I learned a cool trick. First open up the brushes window where you select the different brushes. You can right click, delete brush and then have to select ok, or on the Mac you can hit the alt / option key and then the cursor turns into a pair of scissors, and then simply click on the brush you want to delete and it’s gone. It saves a few seconds, but if you had to clean out 100’s of old or duplicate brushes it will save time. Once you have them cleaned out remember to save and back up your clean brush set. Click on the sideways arrow on the brushes screen and then select “Save Brushes…”

Fox Marks is a great plug-in for Fire Fox to help manage your favorites. Once you sync your favorites you can then access them online, or if the plug-in is installed you can sync it again and load them on a second computer.

Just remember to back up your files on a regular basis, and go through once in awhile and clean up and delete old files you never use.