How Do You Organise Your Screenshots?

My screenshots are as my thoughts, generally. All scattered about, who knows…

By households. I find it the easiest.

I'm still trying to figure out a system. Just after the first of the year I took all the screenshots from 2022 and moved them into a folder of their own on my desktop. Before March 2022 I never took screenshots, not intentionally anyway. I would occasionally bump 'C' but once I started writing and sharing my stories I deleted all of those accidental screenshots. By the time we got to January I had so many screenshots in my folder it was becoming a bit of a pain to find the ones I wanted. With two stories I take so many screenshots that even now I'm already getting overwhelmed. I'm thinking about making folders for each month and storing them there. If I'm going to take it one step further and do a separate folder each month for each story I need to get moving. I'm already closing in on three thousand screenshots. It would take some time to sort through them and get them into the right folders.

I've got a running SimLit story blog, and I use my screenshots for illustrations. So, every time I take screenshots, I cut and paste them out of my Screenshots folder into a separate folder on my hard drive. In that folder, I'm organized into folders by chapter with one subfolder for unedited masters and one "working" subfolder with the pictures I plan to use, cropped and edited. Yeah, it's a little crazy but there you go.

Unfortunately, I lost a lot of my older screenshots when the external hard drive I was using as an archive crashed, but life goes on.

I have two Screenshots folders, one in game and one outside of the game where I occasionally move the screenshots from the in game folder. All my screenshots are in these Screenshots folders. I organize them by date and descending order when I need to search for a particular picture. :smiley:

I made an external folder called Sims 4 chronicles with currently 29 subfolders for various challenges, scenarios and legacies.

The most important of those folders is Androids with the subfolders Gameplay, Stories and Referencess.

Gameplay has 11 subfolders and one of those is Rotational Main - that's the core, the canon timeline so to say.

Inside I have my screenshots sorted by real years since 2018 with 867, 2699, 1397, 2452, 1441 and 661+ screenshots.

I have a folder named Sims 4 inside dropbox (over 6.5gb), inside it are yearly folders, and inside each are folders for each month (01, 02 and so on). This way I know what I was doing at any point in time and see when I was not playing much or when I had a binge. I thought of making a tumblr just to tag everything and take advantage of their /chrono url trick to just look up one specific sim’s chronology but meh, I'm lazy and I dont want my screenshots for all to see. I find it fascinating how I can look at 2014-2015 sims I played and I remember vaguely playing them, but I could not tell you their names now.

For my main rotational save I have them listed by folders for last names that I activaly play I also have a separate folder for less played families where they are by their family names again. Each of the main family folders is then organized like this "(16-21) Juno SanMyshuno" where 16-21 is the IRL years I have added pictures to that folder and the name of the folder gives a hint that it's about a sim named Juno and the time she lived in SanMyshuno. Anbother example: "(17-20) Prospero, Elsi, Alex". It's years 2017-2020 and the parents Elsi and Alex with their child Prospero. Sometimes my names are a bit cryptic and I may need to go over some of them, but the system with years helps me keep up with what folders are still active and as you may see my rotation is super slow and sims live many RL years even with aging on. I like starting a new folder when sims move or sometimes when they start a family and the kids grow and also when the kids move out. It is messy when different main families marry and I have to decide what family folder they stay on!

So here is a picture of the Pancakes family subfolder:
https://i.imgur.com/RhfXjtd.png

@musteni , I love the name of second folder :D

I try to have them in folders per save. Haven't got the patience to make folders to families as well, maybe some day :)

My main screenshots folder looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/03gsFFS.png

The Bird family are my sim self's family, his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren and those screenshots mainly consist of his family scattered around other worlds and the surrounding households i play in Newcrest.

The Dream Home Decorator folder is where screenshots of renovations go as i have a sim who is a interior designer. Here is how that folder looks:
https://i.imgur.com/AwC5Vf2.png
https://i.imgur.com/4OMGhDb.png
https://i.imgur.com/AOmTsJ9.png

I found separating the Dream Home Decorator screenshots ideal as I didn't want to be scrolling through hundreds of living rooms and kitchens while looking for specific screenshots from previous gameplay.