Blog: Out of Control (A Tale of my Content Manager)

One of the things I love the most about Artisan software is the ability to organize content in a way that makes sense to me.   Content organization is very personal and there is no right or wrong way.   So in this blog, please be reminded that I am referring to the right way for ME.  I am not being judgmental of tags except in the way that it pertains to the way I would like to search for my content.  While I feel my way is the right way…it can be really wrong for you.  I am not trying to tell you how to organize your content.  I am simply giving you insight into my thought process and prompt you to think about your organizational structure.

Whenever I get new content for Artisan, I immediately organize it into Library folders.   My library folders are by designer, with the exception of my Creative Memories content. For years, the only content I purchased was Creative Memories content and I have A LOT of it.   My Creative Memories content was my go-to content at all times, even when we were introduced to new designers.  So when Creative Memories closed down, I decided to force myself to use content from other designers by removing 90% of my Creative Memories Content from my software.  I didn’t delete it.  The content is still on my computer’s hard drive.  I just made it so the software didn’t know it was there.  That being said, I still have 1,897 kits that are recognized in my software.

My content is also organized by categories.   I have a category structure that makes sense to me.   I love that I can put one kit in multiple categories without duplicating the kit.

The one area of organization that I refused to touch was the third level – Tags.  For a long time, content came pre-tagged.  As I said before, Content Management is very personal.   It doesn’t work if content is not organized in a way that make sense to the person using it.    Every time I attempted to organize my tags in a way that worked for me, I would purchase new content and that new content came pre-tagged.  Those tags were added back into the software and all of the work I did was for naught.   This is just one of the reasons I decided that tagging content was not the best use of my time.

My top reasons for not tagging: (keep in mind that these tags are useless to me and my personal content organization system, these same tags can prove to be very useful to someone else.)

1. The useless tag:

• Tags are supposed to be applied to individual elements; you are bound to have a lot of them.    I find that the tag “paper” is useless because the software automatically organizes/separates content in .pakits by papers, embellishments, shapes and more.
• Tags such as “blue, green, red, light blue, light green, etc” are useless to me.   I don’t tag by color because the Tools in Artisan 5 allow me to change any element to any color I want it to be. I would prefer to tag by color family – pastel, jewel, primary, neutral.

2. Misspellings.

• The pre-defined tags that automatically import into the software can have several issues with them.  Many are spelled wrong or have added punctuation that can result in duplicating a tag.  For instance “#bows” and “bows”  would be two different tags, but are the same thing.  The plural for leaf is leaves, so when I tag I will look for content as “leaves” not “leafs”.  Unfortunately, there is clearly content that imported into the software tagged with typos such as “leafs” and “greem”.

3. Duplicate tags.

• Because tags are created by the designer of the content, and there are so many different designers available, they may each word a very useful tag differently resulting in multiple tags. In this image there are 2 different tags for heart, 4 different tags for multi (one is spelled wrong), and 4 different tags for frames.

4. It makes no sense (to me).

• Sometimes I just cannot figure out why a particular tag was applied to an element.  Here, all of these elements are tagged with hair and haircut.   I understand the tag being applied to the scissors, but don’t understand why they were applied to the photo corners.  Probably because they were part of a haircut kit.  If the element itself doesn’t pertain to the tag, I would not want it showing up when I select it.   I would have to remove those tags from the corners.

Here are some additional items tagged with “hair” that I cannot figure out why.  I will have to remove the tags from these elements as well.

I cannot figure out why the tag “inches” were applied to these border AND they were not tagged with “borders”.

5. The Overzealous tag.

• Technically all of these items are  correctly tagged with “heart”.   “Heart” would be a very common tag and if I tagged every element that featured a heart on it with the tag, the heart tag would become so overly populated that I would not be able to find anything in it.   I would remove the heart tag from items such as the raccoon, snowman, snails, rain clouds, rock on word art and popcorn.   The heart on these elements is secondary and not a main detail of the element.  I would not search for these elements in this manner, especially since the tools in Artisan software make it so easy to add or remove a heart from the design of an element.  The heart tag is perfect for the paper hearts, stamps, paperclips and sweet heart word art.

Why I think I will start tagging now.

I currently have 16,457 papers,   56,388 embellishments, 2,602 shapes and more content that are currently untagged.  I can’t begin to tell you how much content is tagged that I will need to retag (not to mention the pre-tagged Creative Memories content that I will eventually reintroduce into my content.  I recently found out that new content from the Forever store is no longer being tagged.  What this means for me is that I am able to add new content into my organizational system without any new tags being introduced into my system.  I will have a clean slate.  This is a monster task. It won’t happen overnight. But IF I commit to doing a little bit at a time, week by week, eventually I will have the perfect organization from library folders to tags. Perfect for me that is.