Inspiration/Reference Organization

I’m sure many of you have collections of designs that inspire you, that are good style references, you just plain like, etc. Lately I’ve been trying to collect things myself rather than seeing something I like then 3 months later searching blindly for it. While I do have a small physical folder, most things I see are digital and it’d be easiest to keep them that way, but I’d like a better way to manage them. Delicious is cool for collectiong bookmarks (I like tag organization), but since this is a collection of designs images are more important than links (though links to original sources are always good).

I’m wondering if any of you know of any software to do this better than keeping a folder in MyDocuments. I’d like to add stuff from multiple computers, and 99.9% of things come via the internet, so I’ve been looking at eSnips (http://www.esnips.com/) and Zoho Notebook (http://notebook.zoho.com/). However, it’d been cool if I could download those online collections, both for backup and so I don’t have to download 300mb of pics each time I want to look at stuff.

Any suggestions?

Delicious has been important in my work, I store all my links to suppliers, clients and webshops there.

I am just letting you know Delicious is no more, so if you have links there it is still possible to access them (read-only) and it is a good idea to save them locally now.

Thanks for the heads up!

I use are.na. It’s like Pinterest without the awful UI, and it can support basically any filetype. Also, there are no ads, and the community is largely creatives with good taste.

I’ve been collecting images for almost 20 years.

Sites and software come and go. I use to try to use delicious for bookmarks, but sometimes the bookmarklets don’t work and I get the feeling Yahoo isn’t really supporting it so it’s only a matter of time before it stops working I think. (it’s done now? @ralph? ) Not to mention it doesn’t work to save posts from IG, FB, etc…

Your best bet is to download the image and organize local storage of it for reference. I download images or screen captures and file them into folders. I don’t bother with tagging or to fine filing, but have folders for packaging, graphics, photography, product, footwear by category…

…So far I have about 8Gb of images / a little over 22,000 images… mostly shoes however :slight_smile:

R