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Organizing your Embroidery Designs

Organizing your embroidery designs makes it easier to search and find as we all know; however, with thousands of designs it may be a little overwhelming.  So, let’s look at some good practices for saving designs, tips for naming conventions, and improved searching techniques.  We will use File Explorer on Windows and then discuss using Perfect Stitch Viewer software.

To access File Explorer on your Windows computer, select the folder down on the bottom toolbar.  Once selected, go to the upper right-hand corner where a search window is located.  You can type in the name of the design, such as, “flower”.

If you don’t remember the correct spelling, then add an asterisk *.  For example, “flow*”.  All words with the beginning of “flow” will show up.  You can also use an asterisk * in front of a design format.  For example, “*.pes”.  All pes designs will show up.  This is a great feature if you don’t remember the whole name of the design.

How do you organize your designs?  Do you place them in one folder or divide them into company name folders?  There are many ways to save and organize your designs.  Just think about how you would search for your designs.

A tip to place important folders first is to use 01_Events, 02_Demo or .1_Flowers, .2_Children.  Folders are in order alphabetically so using “0” or “.” will place them at the beginning.  This is great when working with specific designs.  You can always rename the folder if you no longer need it at the beginning.

When you want to move designs from one folder to another, in newer versions of Windows you can choose split-screen or open File Explorer twice and place them side by side.  This makes it easy to move designs or folders.

Another important reminder is to back up your designs in another location besides your computer.  Other options include an external hard drive or cloud option.

Now, let’s discuss using Perfect Stitch Viewer software.  Using this software will enhance, and further help organize your embroidery designs.  Perfect Stitch Viewer software runs in the background of your computer and allows us to view our designs as an image.

Other helpful features include viewing the details of the embroidery design, printing a catalog for a folder or folders of your embroidery designs, and adding tags to your designs to help find your designs easier.  Perfect Stitch Viewer software and Embroidery Tool Shed are great complements.  Embroidery Tool Shed is a free download and houses all our embroidery software.

Listen in as Ashley Jones shares how to add tags to help find your embroidery designs using Embroidery Tool Shed and Perfect Stitch Viewer features.

Adding tags to help find your embroidery designs is a fabulous feature, as well, as some of the other features of Perfect Stitch Viewer.  It is more than just viewing your designs as images!  For more information, watch Ashley Jones on Facebook Live from April 21, 2022.  Enjoy!

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1 COMMENT

  • Karen Poole

    This is a great system! I’ve been buying designs for many many years, and as you said in the article have thousands. I first put them into folders according to company. Next, there are sub folders with design type (3D, in the hoop, animals, children, and so on). Then each sub category may have individual folders too, like under animals there would be folders for the types of animals. But searching does get tough! Years ago I purchased a simple cataloging program that you can do kind of what your system does. Once the design is in the catalog you can search out the type, such as children. All those show up. When you see the one you want, click on it and there are options, such as “open containing file”. I do try to immediately put the design into the catalog when I first download it. I wish your software had been available back then.