Organising in the Caledon Oxbridge Dressing Room. Picture courtesy Larkylouz
“ You only got 100,000? Haha, I’ve got 200,000 and counting!” brags the oldtimer. Of course, he has confessed in secret that he organizes with prim boxes, too, but that secret will never get out in Caledon!
Oldbies sometimes compare huge inventories with pride, but a very big inventory poses several problems for the avatar. It slows down loading speeds when you clear your cache. You might find it difficult to find things. And then you worry about turning into a hoarder.
All around, inventory control is an ongoing issue for most of us, especially if you are a fashion addict, hunt fanatic, or are a builder of complex objects with many parts and saved versions.
However, I learned a trick that allows me to hoard to my heart’s content while keeping my inventory to 11,000.
If you store items in the CONTENTS tab of a prim box, your inventory count goes down and rarely used items are out-of-sight and out-of-mind. You can even store one prim box inside another, as you can’t use folders in the Contents tab.
Here’s what I do:
Step 1: Store Items into Temporary Folder
I put everything I want to store away into a temporary inventory folder.For example, I may want to store my winter clothing. I create my WINTER CLOTHES folder and collect my winter clothes there.
Step 2. Dealing with MY OUTFITS section
Items in the MY OUTFITS folders are made of links, and can’t be stored, but I can move all the winter outfits into one folder to get them out of the way. You might also rename each outfit folder to include the word ‘winter’. Once you have moved your original clothing items into a box, and deleted the inventory copies, the links in your MY OUTFITS will become ‘broken’. I just save them anyway, and am able to fairly quickly reconstruct the outfit again when I unpack in the spring.
Step 3. Create prim boxes for each item of clothing
Once I have the various clothing moved, I want to make sure that all parts of a clothing item stay together. So, for each shirt, dress or pair of shoes, I create a prim box with a descriptive name and drag the entire contents of the original inventory folder into the CONTENTS tab of that box. If the item has a texture with it, I often texture the box with it so I can remember exactly which ‘DAISY DRESS’ I have here.
Step 4. Collect clothing-item boxes into one large box
Once all items are in their separate boxes, I create a final box and drag the individual boxes into that final box’s CONTENTS tab. I create a STORAGE folder in each category in my Inventory (Clothing, Accessories, Body Parts, etc.) and keep the storage prims there so they are easy to find. This also allows me to drag items I want to put in storage to that folder, and then add them to prims when I have time.
One Permissions issue that you should keep in mind is that the perms of the box depend on the perms of the items included in that box. Therefore, if you copy a NO COPY item to a full-perm box, the entire box will be NO COPY. I haven’t found this to be an issue except when I was creating boxes of freebies to give away.
Creating such boxes helps lower your inventory count, as once items are stored, the original folder contents can be trashed. As you develop your own organizational system, prim boxes can aid in organization, too. Or, if you follow my lead, Christmas happens in July, every time I open a storage box!
The secret to inventory control is to have a system; it doesn’t matter what the system is, only that it works for the person using it. In summary, this technique is a bit time-consuming, but such a great way of streamlining your inventory. Happy organizing!
