I have over 20 GBS of CC on my drive that's been accumulated since launch of ts2. My downloads folder is the equivalent of a hoarders episode where I am consistently disgusted with myself for not being more organized.

There are sub folders mixed in with random meshes, sometimes there are no sub folders at all etc. It's basically a mess, is there a way to save these precious baby's without nuking everything and starting over from scratch?

Edit: my thinking is to start over in a brand new downloads folder and adding 100 CCS at a time... Previewing them on a lot and then deleting the ones I don't want. But what if the mesh didn't get included within the 100 ccs i carried over and the game creates that flashing blue icon? Then I'll have to search for the mesh within thousands of sub folders.

When I've done this sort of thing in the past, what I've done is what you suggest but first separate out the stuff I know is working (and I want to keep). Walls and floors, for instance, always work because they're all base game compatible and don't depend on a mesh, CC or otherwise. Similarly, recolours of Maxis stuff - skins and objects.

I'd use Clean Installer for a lot of stuff. I'd sort a batch of CC by type, select all the walls and move them (using the move option) into a folder of their own, then the floors and any terrains. You can then browse that at your leisure. Similarly, anything I recognise and want to keep (not always easy with Clean Installer's thumbnail), I'd move to a labelled folder (you can do this within CI itself). Stuff like face paints and make up are also easy to identify and don't cause issues because again, no custom meshes. Put all your EAxis recolour skins into a folder (I sub-folder a lot of my stuff). And so on, working as far as you can with stuff you can recognise. When I did this en-masse in the Great Sorting, I got through about 85%-90% of stuff in that way without loading the game at all. My downloads folder is now magnificently and arcanely sorted into a fiendish construction of multiple sub-folders. It's complicated but I can usually put my cursor on something within a minute if I decide I want to do something with it. Also, rename shit - you can rename files at will. I always find descriptive names very helpful.

So my suggestion is to deal with the easy stuff first. Separate it out and then you can concentrate on the more awkward stuff by looking at it in game.

You can also exploit the game somewhat, by making an empty, unoccupied lot in your current game, and placing all the CC you want to keep from a certain category on it (say, all CC beds). This allows you to go through and weed out anything you don't use or don't like, or that doesn't work properly. Then you can save and package the lot, and install it into a clean set of user files: all the beds (and their recolours) will be included in the lot's sims2pack, so Clean Installer will drop them in your new Downloads folder, and you can organise them there. Keep going until you've saved everything you want to save, then delete your old Downloads folder.

Of course this works for objects and buy mode stuff, but not for CAS stuff and hacks. You'd have to sort those separately.

Would that method work for stuff you don't want to keep? I seem to have acquired some cc (through a lot download) that I really don't like or that is mispelled or incorrectly described but I can't find them to delete or change.

What if you rename something and then you accidentally added it again later (since the cc won't have the same name it can't overwrite, wont this cause problems?)

^Just be warned that this method might not work properly for all slaved meshes, unless you also include the master files. If you delete master files, you'll end up with a lot of seemingly borked slaved files.

Recolor files also tend to piggyback with some meshes, so it's no real use to place only the recolors you want, because every single recolor that exists for the particular mesh will be added to the sims2pack file. It's not true for all meshes, but I have noticed a lot of master/slaved files plus EAxis objects pick up all available recolors.

Having duplicate files will slow your loading time. If it's a wall, floor or terrain paint you see it show up twice in game. Clean Installer shows doubled up cc in pink.

This is brilliant!

Out of curiosity, would i have to put a recolor of each bed on the empty lot in order for Clean Installer to pick up all the recolors? Or would i only need to place one bed and all the recolors would automatically get packaged with it?

Ah, I am currently busy with the same task, but my CC folder is only 13+ GBs . Still, it is a lot of hard work.

What I did, and will advise you to do the same, is search through your downloads folder with a particular creators name, and move all those CC into a new folder, and repeat the process . Then, check those stuff. After that, you can go with a particular type of CC, like hair, make-up, chairs, etc.

These two methods have saved a lot of my time, so I highly recommend them.

Frankly, if you've been lugging stuff around since the game started, you might want to consider starting from scratch after having backed up your old downloads folder. The new stuff is really quite good -- and if there's *old* stuff that you know you can't live without, save it into a lot first to find the files you need.

The other thing that might help is to decide on a style, and stick to it. Maxis-Match, realistic, apocalyptic, medieval... whichever you prefer. If it doesn't fit the style -- it's out. (I do struggle with that bit myself, esp. when it comes to furniture; I like both MM textures, and less MM's Shastakiss's yeti palette and iCad's woods; I haven't made up my mind yet!)

You can spot it because both files will be coloured pink in Clean Installer. And no, it's not a problem anyway.

There's a good chance the packing up will include all your recolours. The game has a tendency to do that. It's why I don't use that method of sorting - because you tend to get a lot of stuff piggy-backing that you don't necessarily want. Not sure what it does with bedding though. Maybe I'll check.

If you know where the item is in the catalogue, but you can't find the file, then yeah - put it on a lot, package the lot, then open the sims2pack in Clean Installer to see what the object's filename is. Then you can find the file in your Downloads folder and delete it.

It kinda depends. The game is only supposed to package the recolours you actually use on the lot, but it often messes up and packages all of them. So you might get lucky... but it'd be safer to place all the recolours you want to keep.

Thanks, Nysha!

Thank you so much for all your responses, it helps me a ton!

For sorting through Bodyshop content I find Cat's filename tooltip adder (get it here) is a life saver. It lets you add the filename as a tooltip to bodyshop objects (make sure you tick "change existing tooltips" when you run it), so when you mouse over something in bodyshop you can see what the file is called. Running it on everything does take quite some time, but I found it a lot easier to go over things when I could look at them in Bodyshop and see what the file is called.

Doesn't help you find custom meshes used by the outfit, but for that I'd make a Sim wearing the outfit, then package it so that I could see in the sims2package what the mesh is called. There's also delphys downloads organizer that lets you search for orphan meshes.

For objects you have simwardrobes Object modifier program. It scans your downloads folder by default, but you can also direct it to scan whichever folder you want if you'd prefer to take it in smaller chunks. It shows you which object meshes it finds in the folder, sometimes with a thumbnail showing the object, sometimes just a purple square (I found closing and running the program again will get make a few more objects show a thumbnail). It can tell you what it's called in-game, what it's catalog description is, and what the objects filename is. It has buttons to delete all recolors belonging to that object, and to delete the mesh itself. I wouldn't use it to edit objects, I did that back when I sorted it and apparently it's not compatible with compressorizer, things lose their catalog information if you compress files after editing with the program. But it's quite handy for going over CC and deleting things you don't want.