Hi, i love the ''The Sims 4'' game, however, there's something that REALLY ruins everything and that's the public gallery.Explanation:The game is amazing, i can create sims and homes whatever way i want, i stay hours making them, putting love and a really big effort to make them more personal and personalized, then, for precaution, i upload my creations in the gallery, because i don't want to lose them if something happens to my computer, and that's where the problem is. As i already said, i make them personal, for me and my boyfriend for exemple, then, when i make the upload some random people dowload my creation, even tho i put messages asking them to not do it because they're personal/privite, but even tho people disrespect my messages, so... i stay hours and even days make something that i really enjoy just for someone that i don't even know steal my creations, just because it doesn't exists a private gallery/private profile.In short:PLEASE EA, make a private profile/upload gallery so that i can enjoy your game again, it really upset me that something that i put so much effort it's just stolen by someone.

If i can, the gallery is made for share your creations with everyone, if you want to take a private "backup" of your creation, i suggest to buy an usb-key (you don't need a bigger one, even a small 8gb usb key is good) and copy the tray folder (and if you want the save folder), you can find in the the sims 4 folder, in documents, but if you use mods, you just already know, the tray folder, is the folder when the data of all your creations are saved.

@arumiarch I know someone who worked on iPhoto. They were a full time Apple employee for YEARS doing that. $$$$$ (I didn’t even mention above that probably one of those seven people on the proposed private gallery team would be a team lead and make more money.) The issue is less that 100 MB is overly generous—it’s ridiculously small—and more that when you have 33 million players/users, it’s going to be huge whether you want it to be or not. Seriously. Scaling for that many users is inherently huge and expensive whether you set a quota or not. (Which they absolutely would.)

What @Slytherclaw72 said. Unfortunately, the gallery is intended as a sharing tool rather than a backup tool. I doubt people are even reading your description, as the assumption is that people put things on the gallery to download. I would recommend copying your saves and tray folders to a service like Dropbox or OneDrive. If you do this nightly it can serve as a backup if you lose your hard drive.As for sharing with your boyfriend: The names of the files are, sadly, very cryptic but perhaps you could sort by date and put the files timestamped to what you just finished in a folder you share with your boyfriend, and they can import them into their game from there. I hope that helps.

You already have a private gallery, it’s called your library.You can back it up the exact same way you (hopefully) back up your saves, since you should never reply solely on an outside entity to preserve your data. I keep 3 copies of my sims files when I backup: one elsewhere on my computer, one on a portable storage device and one in a Google drive reserved solely for this purpose. If there’s a system failure in one backup location, it’s not going to affect the others.Just save the tray folder along with your saves folder and you can easily restore it if your computer dies or something. That said, I would not mind the option of being able to mark certain pieces private or friends only so I could have a friend preview something before it goes out publicly on the gallery, but it should not be just a way of getting out of doing personal backups.

@arumiarch So, you told @kaze_____90 that it wouldn't cost much for a big company for them to create a backup service for your library. I work for a non-gaming software company, so let's take a look.Bearing in mind that garbage in, garbage out, I'll guestimate. I'm not a builder but I do download things off the gallery and occasionally build, so I'll use the size of my tray folder as an average. LilSimsie, James Turner, and Deligracy would use more and lots of users would use less and I don't have the information to do better. My tray folder is 101 MB and lots of people reading this might be laughing maniacally but again, I don't have an average.According to this article, the Sims for has 33 million players. With my crummy average, that's 3,333,000,000 MB, or 3,254,882.8125 GB.They would probably use existing cloud storage rather than creating a data farm just to hold user backups. Cloud storage is priced by the GB. I'm assuming you want the fast storage rather than the slow storage, so let's look at that. For cloud provider #1 (last time I mentioned names my post was edited as being "commercial") that's $74,862 a month. For cloud provider #2, that's $488,000 a month, wow. Also that provider looks at read/write operations as part of their pricing and based on this info from EA which shows 11.3 million gallery uploads (or 941,666 per month average) and 201 million gallery downloads (or 16,750,000), more than their standard 100,000 write operations per month. Luckily that only adds a measley $16.56, but it does speak to not getting slower storage. Let's not waste our time on slow storage, shall we?This doesn't include developer time to probably rewrite the gallery from the ground up to add security. This would distract them from adding features to the base game and creating DLC. Again, I have no visibility into this, but just for kicks and based on an article I googled saying 7 is the perfect team size (garbage in, garbage out) and this Glassdoor page saying that Maxis developers make $108,000-117,000 a year (low confidence, garbage in garbage out) that comes to $757,519 a year, or $63,126 a month.So low end estimate: $63,126 + $74,862 = $137,988 a month. To start. Eventually they wouldn't need as many developers, but this also doesn't account for gallery usage over time. Would people build more if they knew Maxis was backing up their builds for them?(Building a data farm would be an even larger proposition, as they would have to purchase a site to house all the storage and hardware for all the storage and people to repair broken hardware and... there's a reason people are using cloud services.)So in short: You can expect Maxis to spend $137,988 a month to back up your builds for you, or you could back up your PC. There are a wide variety of backup providers, some of which back up your entire documents folder to the cloud, some of which create exact snapshots of your hard drive so you can restore if your hard drive fails (my personal favorite), and I'm sure someone will edit my post as being "commercial" if I link one (I'm not bitter!), but... back up your PC.No, really. Back up your PC. Not for the Sims, but for everything on your hard drive. Back up your computer.

Private Gallery in The Sims 4 and stolen creations

28 Replies

kaze_____90
4 years ago
If i can, the gallery is made for share your creations with everyone, if you want to take a private "backup" of your creation, i suggest to buy an usb-key (you don't need a bigger one, even a small 8gb usb key is good) and copy the tray folder (and if you want the save folder), you can find in the the sims 4 folder, in documents, but if you use mods, you just already know, the tray folder, is the folder when the data of all your creations are saved.
arumiarch
4 years ago
That´s an option, but it´s not an official way to do it, i still would like to be able to save my creations in a private backup, linked to my EA account
arumiarch
4 years ago
And i already don't like using mods because of that extra effort to find the folder an save in a pendrive for example or in my pc, since these folders are not connected to internet and are not conected to my account at all and i still have the risk of losing them because they're not linked to anything
kaze_____90
4 years ago
honestly i don't understand why you need to have your file linked to your account, at least is bettere have file saved on different devices, because if, for wathever reason your account became, unusable, for example, you change computer and forgot the EA password, or someone hack your credential and delete your profile, or EA server have issues ect, in that case, having your files, linked only to your account you risk to lost everything, forever in some case, at least if you don't trust of usb key, you can save the tray and save folder in online storage like google drive (and if you have a google account like gmail, you have 15gb of space for saving file) to save your file in a secure way (not connetted to your profile, but directly to you), and i don't understand what extra effort for mods you talk, we talk to copy a mod from the folder where you downloaded it, to paste into the mod folder, cost of operations? 3 seconds more less.
arumiarch
4 years ago
i didn't want to have to leave the game to save, because doing all this is gambiarra is not an official way

Gambiarra has no English translation, but it would be:
Gambiarra is an improvisation, an adjustment [invention] made in any way that solves a certain problem during a certain period. Remembering that the period usually extends until the gambiarra starts to fail and is then replaced by another gambiarra.

it's like an improvised, unofficial way that's not well guaranteed but it might work
ericaxbee
4 years ago
If I understand what you're asking correctly, there is a way to do this. Instead of sharing to the gallery, just save your Sim/Family/Lot to your library instead of the gallery. I have attached screenshots to include what I mean.
arumiarch
4 years ago
@kaze_____90
if there is a public gallery i don't see why not have a private gallery, because the same way i "can have a private gallery" doing it another way, people could have a public gallery by taking the folders and sharing on twitter, reddit or anywhere else, but no, EA has created a public gallery in the game, so i don't see why not create a private one too
arumiarch
4 years ago
@ericaxbee
thanks for trying to help, but if the game is uninstalled or something happens to my pc, i would lose my creation because it's not connected to the internet
ericaxbee
4 years ago
I don't think that's the case. I can access those files even when I play the game offline. That being said, if you lost access to your actual account, then yes you would lose access to those files. If you're looking for a way to save and backup the files without being tied to your account, then you would have to save and backup your Sims tray folder like the previous commenter mentioned. Even having a "private gallery" wouldn't resolve that because if you had to create and use a new account, you wouldn't have access to that private gallery anymore anyway.
arumiarch
4 years ago
@ericaxbee
i would not like a private gallery in case i lose access to my account, i want to save/upload it for myself, that i can access even if i change computers, even if my computer breaks down or even if the game is uninstalled
if i have a private gallery inside the game, every time i install the game and link to my account everything i created would be there