Getting serious about images

As a designer, graphics always has meant a lot to me and I always love to collect amazing art, but I am not very good at organizing my images. Yesterday I decided to increase my library with some new graphics from Freepik.com, which is a service I love to use. I got an annual license, which will give me the ability to download around 36,000 images over the course of a year, which feels really good.

In order to be able to handle all of those images, I really needed to get things organized. So I jumped into Miro and did some mind mapping to see what kind of structure I should start with. I then reorganized my folders accordingly, and I am now reinstalling Dropbox and work on setting up Eagle again. If you have not tried Eagle, then it is by far the best product I have ever used, but it has been acting up a bit, so I have downloaded 4.0 to see if that works better.

With the new folder structure, I feel a bit more organized, and the next step is to make sure the images are also useable since that when you download them, they are unoptimized. So I have set up a TinyPNG account to reduce the size, and then I am using Image Resizer to quickly resize the dimensions of the images. So each folder now also have two subfolders named Optimized and WebP, where I add the images I resize and optimize.

This little exercise will keep me busy for a while because I have a ton of graphics! Fortunately, this is also something that makes me extremely happy because I absolutely love to work with and look at beautiful graphics. Right now I am waiting for the 120,000+ files to resync from Dropbox and then for Eagle to pick them up so I can start working with them.

It is a pretty awesome day.