I found a great little Windows-only freeware program that's been a great help to me in managing the tons of brush sets I've downloaded.
Check it out....maybe it will help you.
The program is called ABRviewer, written and provided as freeware by
an Italian guy named Luigi Bellanca. He made it to help people who make brush sets and put them on websites for download.
It generates thumbnail images of all the brushes in a set. You can
export the set image to use on your webpage, or even the individual
thumbnail images. You can even set the size for the thumbnails....
But, most of us are on the other end....... we download the brushes....LOTS of brushes..... I've found this little program to be a really useful tool for viewing and finding brushes among my collection.
You can read about the program here:
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net
....and download it here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...d=143912#files
It installs and runs as a separate program, not within Photoshop.
This makes it easy to view and search your brushes without installing
them. After you find what you want, simply install in photoshop only
the sets you need.
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Unfortunately there's no help file or manual, but here are a few tips
to get you going.
---Start out by clicking the Select Folder button, and navigate to
where you keep your brush sets. When you've selected the folder of
brushes you want to view, click OK and all the sets in that folder
will be listed in the window on the left of the screen.
---To view an individual set of brushes, click on its name to
highlight it, then right-click next to it within the blank area of
that little window, and thumbnail images of each of the brushes will
be displayed in the big window on the right.
---I find it more practical to right-click and choose display all,
then wait a few seconds for the program to process (shown in the
progress window at the bottom), and all the sets will be displayed at
once. Use the scroll bar down the right side to scroll through and
find your brushes. (Naturally, the more sets loaded, the longer it
takes,but it's really not long. And if you view the whole folder, you
only wait once.)
---All the sets you're previewing will be listed in the bottom left
window. To see what's in a particular set, click on a set name in
that window and each of its thumbnails will be highlighted with a
little box....scroll up or down to find it. Or, if you just look at
the thumbnails and click on one, then look in that lower left window
and you will see it's set name highlighted. This way, you know what
set to load in photoshop.
---You can set viewing options in the upper left. Just "scrub" the
arrows left/right to change the thumbnail size. After a few seconds
processing time, the thumbnails will be redrawn in the chosen size.
Click in the box by either Background or Foreground to bring up a
color picker and set the color you want. I recommend keeping a check
in the box by Alternating Background. This allows you to see where
one brush set ends and the next one begins... very useful.
---The Export menu allows you to export individual thumbnail images,
or to export the entire contents of the preview window as a single
image. If you want to make an image of a single set of brushes, it
should be the only set on display when you export.
---It only exports in PNG format, but you can change this to whatever
you like with a simple batch file action in photoshop, right?
---Right click in lower left window and choose Close All to clear the
preview window.
---If you double-click on any of the thumbnails, you get a pop-up window
that displays the brush at it's full size. This is great for
examining the detail.
---If you click on a brush thumbnail, two little numbers appear at
the top of the thumbnail .....like this>>> 48;22 .... I haven't yet
figured out what they mean.... perhaps you can tell me? :-)
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Anyway, I hope some of you find this helpful. I still try to categorize my brush sets into folders, as suggested in a post above. But when I want to find a specific brush I remember, or even just do a visual search for something useful for my current image, I search in ABRviewer. It's more useful (for me, anyway) than installing them all in Photoshop and looking at their tiny images.
photofixer