Organizing Embroidery Designs

Organizing Embroidery Designs can be a challenge. Everyone loves to collect new embroidery designs. And, it’s easy to forget where the one design is, that you just purchased, and wanted to use, if you don’t have a system to organize them.

“I just download some new designs and now I can’t find the one that I want.

What is the best method for organizing my embroidery designs?”

There are many ways to organize your designs.

Start now and organize a few of your design files at a time. Eventually, you will have a system that works for you!

Here are a few ideas:

Organizing Embroidery Designs by Categories

Make separate folders and label them by categories, such as “dogs, flowers, borders, Christmas, Halloween, etc.”

That’s a very usable plan. You can go to the “dog” folder and look through all the designs to find a dog that you would like to embroider.

Initially, I started with this strategy.

But, there is a problem with this plan. You cannot tell who made the design and what the user rights are for those designs.

Some digitizers allow you to stitch designs to sell and others do not. Others are personal use only. How will you know?

Organizing Embroidery Designs by Creator

This is the system that I have used for years and it works really well. I have talked to a lot of others who do it this way also.

This system also seems to work the best as a long-term solution when you have thousands of designs.

To set up this system:

• create ONE folder and name it EMBROIDERY DESIGNS
• then create a folder under it and name them for each company that created the designs going into that folder

Here is a sample of the basic structure for the folders:

After you set up the main folders, then I go back to each of those folders and add a few sub-folders.

I usually only start with a few and then add more as I sort the designs.

Here is a sample of the sub-folders:

Now, you can start saving all of your new designs to the appropriate folder immediately.

And, little-by-little, go through all of your design files and move them to the appropriate folders as well.

Locating a design from your Organized Designs

The next time you are looking for a particular flower design from a certain company, just look in the folder for that creator and under the FLOWER category.

For some reason, it seems easy to remember who made the design. So it’s pretty easy to get the right folder on the first try.

You may still have 20 design files of flowers, but at least this narrows it down for you!

It’s much easier than looking through 500 design files!

I have found this system to work very well for finding my designs. And, as I keep collecting more designs, I can adjust the categories and add more as needed or even combine some.

Making backup copies is easy too. Just copy the entire EMBRODIERY DESIGN folder to a backup location (example: external hard drive). It’s a good practice to do this every time you add a large group of new designs.

If you have any questions, please send me an email at support@embroideryvillage.com and I will try to help!