Searching for texture organiser

EvolMate

Hello. So, i have a huuge collection of textures and I use some of them time to time. So I'm searching a program that could help me sort, title and browse all of them.

Mainly, i need:

• A program that won't move textures. It should just have a database of them somewhere.
• An ability to create collections of textures within that program. So one texture could be in different collections but exist as only one file on computer
• An ability to title and tag textures as well as search.

Does anyone have a good program to do all that? Or maybe you could recommend something to keep my textures organized? Because i have about 200GB of them and, say, some of them are just photos, some are tiled. Some are handdrawn, others are not... Etc. Creating folders and moving them is not enough. Also I use them (not them all, i usually search something specific) pretty often...

Computron

I am interested in how Polycounter's approach this as well.

Adobe Bridge is included with Photoshop these days IIRC.
It has all those things plus some excellent adobe software integration.
That is what I am using.

LoTekK

I've been putting together my own image browser in my free time (no white space when viewing thumbs!), and have been thinking about adding exactly those sorts of capabilities to it (tagging and collections).

Assuming I get to that point, I'll be sure to share. I reckon this thread might be a good place to get some other ideas, too.

Chase

Kind of a side note, but are there differences between PNG over a Targa? They both have Alpha channel support, and I like seeing the image of the file so I'd go with PNG? Not sure if one file is supported more over the other in the industry.

Elyaradine

@Chase: As far as I know, a PNG is effectively a compressed Targa. The only workflow difference is that when Photoshop exports PNGs it pre-multiplies the alpha channel into the RGB channels, which may or may not be what you want. (A free plug-in called SuperPNG works around that though.)

Eric Chadwick

I just use good folder naming, and XnView for browsing. XnView has a tagging function, but I never bothered to use it since that would require adding all those tags in the first place.

Some image browsers here
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTools#Image_Browsing_Software

repete

Adobe Bridge CS6 x64 is blazing fast and shows ALL formats correctly, the best there is imo, you can add keywords in bridge which is a great way to get organised. I have tried FastStone Image Viewer and it was fast with a nice UI but transparent TIFF files where showing up black, useless as I use this format for my mudbox stamps !!!

Good luck adding tags to 200GB worth of textures

EvolMate

Thank you all who replied

Personally I use ACDSee 3 with a lot of plugins which allows me to vew a lot of various formats (it has plugins for, say, DDS format and also allows to use photoshop import plugins to view files and even creating previews). It also has tagging feature somewhere. But it doesnt allow to create collections afai, and that is the main purpose.

repete wrote: »

Good luck adding tags to 200GB worth of textures

Well yes, program should be able also to edit group of files.. Say, add tag "Wooden" to selected group of textures. Most of textures in my "collection" are hi-res references. Say, i have a folder with 12 photos of gates, each ~6mb huuge JPG file./

kurt_hectic

sagethumbs shows psd files in win explorer (Support 162 image formats (224 extensions))

http://code.google.com/p/sagethumbs/downloads/detail?name=sagethumbs_2.0.0.15_setup.exe&can=2&q=

EvolMate

kurt_hectic wrote: »

sagethumbs shows psd files in win explorer

Wow, thank you! This is not what I'm looking for now (um, i dont use win explorer anymore), but i was looking for that ages ago and sure will find it a good use :thumbup: