Too many brushes! What do i do??? Please help me!

[festimo]

I have a bunch of sets of brushes saved in my presets folder, like Wedding Brushes, Smoke Brushes, Etc... each with about 25-50 brushes in each set. I have so many of these sets that when I go to change my set of brushes in CS3 the list extends past the side of my screen and I can only access up through the S's (as far as the title) in the sets of brush's. If I combine them all then I will have one set of brushes with 5000 brushes, and finding the brush I want to use would take even longer.

I guess what I really want to know, is in CS2 you can seperate sets of brushes into sub folders and when you go to choose a new brush the menu has sub catagories for each set, but in CS3 if you seperate them into different subfolders it still reads them all individually and makes one HUGE list of the sets of brushes. Do you know how to divide them up into Sub Sets instead of individual sets?

[agentxi]

well what i do is setup an external folder on my HD that isn't in adobe's default brushes folder.

What this does is speed up the loading of PS because it doesn't have to load so many brushes.

and secondly if you choose the "load brushes" option, you can still locate and load brushes, manually, so you don't have all 50 sets loaded at a time, only the Default brushes and the Ones you needed for the project at hand.


As for your "subfolders" question, I have no idea, I never tried.

[Tony_photoplus]

As was said before I would put them in designated folders categorises them on your HD. Also download the ABR viewer. Here are a few links

Laurie McCanna’s Free Art Site » ABR Photoshop Brush Viewer Updated

And the ABR viewer link..

Opensource photohop brush viewer - abrViewer

That should help but do you really need that many. It comes a to a point where you become so saturated you don't know what you have got and to search through them takes an age. And, then you need to put them on a disk as you have so many. In fact thats what I do, I keep so many on the HD and have the disk handy.

[tamlin]

Originally Posted by Tony_photoplus

That should help but do you really need that many.

Ha! I was going to ask that very question, but Tony beat me to it. The thing is, brushes are addictive (same with fonts) - I know, because I'm just as bad at hoarding brushes and styles and fonts and actions and filters and whatnot - but sometimes you've got to take a step back and consider. You'll probably find out that over the course of the last year or so you've only used a fraction of the resources that you have installed, so it might be a good idea to do a bit of housekeeping. As agentxi pointed out, you don't need to delete these resources - you can just archive them somewhere else and then load them up as and when (or if) they're needed. The abrViewer as mentioned by Tony is also a great tool to get if you want to get to grips with your brush overload.

[festimo]

thanx everyone, i appreciate your input! i guess i have some housecleaning to do today

[soddun]

Thanks for the links above! That's definitely something valuable in the world of too many brushes... :-)