Keep your inventory under control (Part 2)

This article was published in Fusion Magazine, April 2014. Click for the magazine!

Greetings everybody! In the previous issue we started deciding on a folder structure to begin sorting our items, and we learned how to open a second inventory window, which makes the process easier. It's safe to assume that after a month, we've advanced some bits in our task of keeping our inventory sorted, by sorting all of our clothes. What would be next?

Next would be making sure that we haven't forgotten any piece of clothing. When inventories have been unchecked for a long time, it's easy to not see items, especially if they're hidden under piles of Sort this later folders (Haven't we all done this?)

How do we make sure that we will be able to find our items, no matter how hidden they are?

By using the search feature of the inventory window.

We can use this feature in two modes: basic and advanced. In basic mode, we simply begin to type the name of the item we're looking for, and as we type, the viewer shows all the items containing that text as a part of the name.

This way, we can start to look for missing accessories, garments, etc. For example, type neck and likely most of your necklaces will show up, type ear and many earrings will show, and so on. Of course, this relies on the creator having given the item a name that makes sense, but this is usually the case. And if you still feel that items are missing somewhere in your inventory, instead you can type a store name, or the abbreviation. Creators often include their store names in the folder name, so this can make it easy to find their items.

As mentioned, there's also an advanced search mode. This consists of using a filter: The search text we type would be restricted to one more criterion. Which criterion? We can restrict by asset, the type of item we're looking for. For example, we may be looking only for notecards. Or we may be looking only for clothing layers and objects. So we would proceed this way, in the official viewer from LL (Firestorm has a Filter option right under the search edit box, other viewers may differ):

Open your inventory window if you haven't already, and click on the gear icon. Then click Show Filters from the menu that pops up. That opens a secondary window with checkboxes for the kind of assets we would like to include in our search. The way to proceed is: First, begin typing your search text, then untick boxes to restrict the kind of asset you're looking for.

This is very handy, because, as we know from the previous issue, we may have two inventory windows showing when sorting our items. So we can indeed have one of the windows where we use the Search tool to find our items, and the other window, where we have focused in our categorized structure, to move the items we find.

Make sure to complete sorting all of your clothes, for in the next issue we'll talk about packing: We don't want our inventories to run wild with hundreds of thousands of items!

Enjoy your SL.