Welcome to Monday! New creative team member Leah here with this week’s “What Matters Monday.”

How do you organize your digiscrap supplies? Do you keep kits together or separate them into similar objects? Do you categorize by designer? Do you use specialized software (e.g., ACDSee) to tag all of your supplies?

Here’s a little background on me to help you understand my own personal organizational system….I am a total mix-and-match scrapper. I hardly ever use one singular kit to complete a layout. Check out my gallery…my credits lists are always a mile long. I generally have some sort of pre-conceived plan before I even open Photoshop as to what elements my layout will contain. I’ve been digiscrapping since December 2006 and I tend to hoard everything I can get my hands on (even if I know I probably will never use it!) Therefore, being able to locate what I am looking for in a relatively short amount of time is key!

I have a 150 GB external hard drive devoted solely to digital scrap supplies (best investment EVER!) At present, it contains 35,229 files which comprise 42.1 GB.

So, yeah…I have a lot to organize.

I’ve divided my stuff into four main categories, or folders:

1. Papers
2. Elements
3. Alphas
4. Templates

Each category has very specific subfolders. For instance, inside my Papers folder, you’ll see this:

Anal-retentive, you say? Maybe. Hey, it works!

As you can see, I deconstruct all my kits into parts. Oftentimes, files aren’t labeled with the designer’s name or kit name, so I try to rename files before adding them to folders so that creating credits lists is less of a hassle.

Here’s a peek inside my Elements folder:

Here’s a more comprehensive listing of all the subfolders inside the Elements folder:

• Angel & Devil
• Angels
• Animals
• Arrows
• Auto stickers
• Baby
• Bathtime
• Birds, bugs, & butterflies
• Birthday
• Bob the Builder/Construction
• Brackets
• Brads, buttons, & bottlecaps
• Calendars & dates
• Cards & Bingo
• Charms
• Christmas
• Clocks
• Clothing & Shoes
• Comic books
• Crowns & tiaras
• Dinosaurs
• Disney
• Easter
• Fabrics
• Fairies
• Flowers
• Food & cooking
• Fourth of July
• Frames
• Gears
• Girly-girl
• Grids
• Halloween
• Hearts
• Heritage & family trees
• Homes
• Keys & keyrings
• Kisses
• Leaves, branches, & pinecones
• Music
• Nautical
• Overlays
• Paint smudges & ink spots
• Paisleys and flourishes
• People
• Photo corners
• Photomats
• Pins, clips, tape, staples, & prongs
• Post-its, tags, file folders, tabs, and journaliing elements
• Ribbons & stitches
• Rulers & tape measurers
• Sequins & glitter
• Sliders & buckles
• Snowflakes
• Snowmen
• Space
• Sports
• St. Patrick’s Day & shamrocks
• Stamps
• Stars
• Summer & beach
• Sweet treats
• Swirls & doodles
• Thanksgiving
• Torn borders
• Torn cardboard
• Vehicles & transportation
• Viewfinders
• Vintage ephemera
• Weather
• Word art
• Writing utensils

As you may expect, many of these subfolders have sub-sub-folders as evidenced by my Ribbons & Stitches folder below:

Hopefully this has inspired someone to begin the daunting task of organizing their digiscrap supplies! Even if you organize by designer, store, or color, organization is SO worth the hassle.