How to organize your tips

[ghoffman]

How do you organize your tips? i.e. How and where do you save the restoration, retouching and manipulation tips you want to keep handy for future reference?

You could search RP or other web pages to try to find the tip again. You could search through books and magazines to find the tip again.

I'm finding that I need some way to organize the tips I find, so that I'll have a chance of finding the tip later when I want to use it. So far, I'm thinking maybe a spreadsheet or a database would work. One column or field could be a brief description of what the tip helps you do (e.g. remove red eye). A second column or field could be the details of how to perform the tip. A third column or field could contain the names of images, saved on your computer, which illustrate the tip. A fourth column or field could contain a reference to the source of the tip (e.g. 5/19/2002 tip from RetouchPRO, Retouching Challenge #12, Lisa Peters' entry, tip by Doug Nelson).

Then when you want to find a tip, search your spreadsheet or database for the first column or field. You could also just put all of the info in a normal text file, but then when you searched, you could match on words that were not in the brief description of the tip.

What method(s) do you use?

Thx!

Gene

[Doug Nelson]

For my tips I started a website

But really, I don't store them or sort them. I just read them and file in my mental rolodex. Some I remember, most I don't, but I eventually re-read them somewhere and a larger percentage sticks.

And the best, seriously the most excellent, virtually foolproof, marvelous way to remember a tip is to teach it to someone else.

[Ed_L]

I'm kind of like Doug. No easy way to find a particular tip. Sometimes I think they get lost in the "tip heaven" folder, which is hidden. But Gene has some good suggestions. And of course, Doug's can't be beat for remembering them.

Ed

[Mike Needham]

To be honest, I also fall into the catagory of 1/2 remembered tips, only becoming fully lucid when I delve back and re-read them

However there are also a few other methods that I use, because the web is such a transitory medium. PDF documents are a great way of storing tips and tutorials and can be saved onto external media or on the hard-drive, also you can create your own PDF out of any web page. Perhaps the most common method I use to store tips and snippets I come acoss - the gool old 'cut n' paste'.

I also periodically save my favourites list to CD as I often come across links that would never be found again with my constant reformatting of my hard drive

[DJ Dubovsky]

I copy them into Word or save directly if they are a PDF format and then file them into a folder called Tutorial Documents. The trouble with saving the urls is that they tend to disappear down the road and your tutorials are lost to you. This way I can find them when I need to review a technique and I catagorize them by their particular techniques such as Layer, Selections, Tool tips etc.
DJ

[ghoffman]

Mike,

I like your idea of using PDFs to capture a tip from a web page.

DJ,

That's a great idea to categorize the tips by technique.

Thx!

Gene

[Ed_L]

I do have a folder strictly for quick-time movies. It's easy enough to find what you're looking for, and I find the movies very good teaching aids. Good idea to back them up too.

Ed

[DJ Dubovsky]

Ed,
Are you saving the URLs that have the quict time movies or are you able to save the movies themselves? Just curious. I didn't quite know how to save them to file.
DJ

[Ed_L]

Hi Deb,

I just right click on the link for the movie. This allows you to save it to your computer.

Ed

[DJ Dubovsky]

I never thought to do that Ed. Thanks. Usually I watch the movies and then looked for a way to save them but never thought I could do the same thing as I would for a photo. Boy I have alot of saving to do now.
DJ

[Ed_L]

You're welcome. Have fun.

Ed

[Mike Needham]

Dang Ed - I can feel my cd-burner will be getting a thorough workout with all those quicktime movies coming its way a simple idea but one I wouldnt have thought of in a million years.

[Doug Nelson]

Of course, you can always type your tips into our tips forum, that way you'll have a powerful SQL engine to search through them anytime you want

[DJ Dubovsky]

Are you refering to tips we get from other sites? Can't we get in trouble doing that?
DJ

[ghoffman]

Originally posted by Ed_L
I do have a folder strictly for quick-time movies. It's easy enough to find what you're looking for, and I find the movies very good teaching aids. Good idea to back them up too.

Ed

Ed,

I searched RP and found a few QuickTime tip links. I also searched on Google and found some, but they, of course, don't have any RP recommendations.

Perhaps you could start a thread that lists links to web pages which have tips with QuickTime movies that you liked.

Thx!

Gene