Asset Organization

Introduction There are several different types of assets—images, videos, audio tracks, to name the main ones. In this article, I will focus on images, but the same principles apply equally well to the rest. Why Bother What's wrong with just dumping every creation into a single folder? Nothing at all. That is a form of organization. The difficulty comes when you create many, many images. Finding something you made weeks or months ago becomes painful. Sure, the computer's filesystem would help by letting you sort in various ways, but at the end of the day, you still have to look at a lot of images to find the one you want. Over time, even landmark images that once helped you orient yourself fade from memory. Adding metadata and structure will help lessen the problem quite a lot. Types of Platform-Based Asset Management I've been a member of many different AI platforms, and one thing that strikes me is how each one helps (or not) you manage the assets you create. There are a few classes of support, ranging from none to excellent. No Support Especially in the early days, platforms didn't offer much help in managing your assets. You could either download your generation or discard it. The next generation would replace the last one, and if you didn't download it, it was gone forever. Platforms still exist that operate this way. The reason? It's cheap. They don't have to pay storage costs. Single Container Many platforms give you a generation folder to pick through. What makes this an excellent evolutionary step is that now you can generate without fear of forgetting to download your images. These systems invariably allow you to go through your generations later. At that time, you can delete what you don't like, download what you do like, and so on. Albums / Folders With this setup, you can assign your images to specific albums, making them a lot easier to find. You give the album a well-thought-out name, then put everything that aligns with that name into it. This is very much like a real-world photo album, and has the same constraints. Each image can exist in only one album. For example, you might have the following albums: Puppy Dogs, Kitty Cats , Slimy Snakes . All images of dogs go into the Puppy Dogs album, etc. Now, if you are looking for an image of a dog, you don't have to search through any other albums. This dramatically reduces the amount of searching you will do. Collections / Tags Collections and tags are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing. There is often a distinction between them: a tag is typically treated as a single word or short phrase, while collections can have more metadata associated with them. As far as organization goes, they serve the same purpose. Just as with albums, collections let you divide your images into smaller, more cohesive groups. They offer the same base-level support as albums, and an additional layer of usefulness. In this system, an image can belong to multiple collections. Let's use the same example as for albums. You have the following collections: Puppy Dogs, Kitty Cats , Slimy Snakes . All your images are stored in the appropriate collections. Now, let's say for the sake of argument that you wanted more variability. Perhaps you want to know all the images generated by DALL•E 3 and by Flux. You would create a DALL•E 3 collection and a Flux collection. You can add each of your images to the appropriate model collections, and they will stay in both. Obviously, this is very useful. You can manage all Flux-based assets without losing the core distinguishing details. Where these systems can get into trouble is in maintenance. You have to keep everything in sync, and the more collections you have, the easier it is for things to drift out of alignment. So what's the right approach? The answer to that is, it depends. Depending on your workflow, you might be fine with no platform support. In my opinion , the more varied your work is, the more flexible your support needs to be, whether it's on or off the platform. What does BudgetPixel support? Currently, BudgetPixel supports folders and includes a special "folder" that provides all of your images at once. They plan to add support for collections in the near future as well. This makes an excellent system. All your images are where they belong, but they can also be referenced for other classifications. But it gets better. BudgetPixel stands apart from the competition by supporting nested folders. I haven't seen this on any platform I've worked with. (Some other platforms may do it as well, but I haven't run across them.) You get three levels of nesting, giving you amazing flexibility for your organizational needs. For example, my top-level folders are very general categorizations such as Projects , Experiments , etc. Under Projects , I have each project by name. In each project folder, I have a folder for published generations and another for failed/unpublished generations. My Experiments folder is organized differently. In it, I have subfolders for the type of experiment (similar to projects), each containing subfolders for each model I ran the experiment on. This alone makes it very easy to find what I'm looking for. With collections, life will be grand. Why do I like the nested folder approach? On another platform (NC), I have about 30,000 creations (probably around 45-60,000 individual distinct images and videos), divided into over 700 collections. The sheer quantity of the collections makes it difficult to find anything. I've taken to naming my collections there with multi-level names to try simulating nested folders. It works, but not great. It's a bit of a struggle to maintain. Flat collections or folders don't scale well. Wrapping Up Good asset organization isn’t about being neat — it’s about staying productive as your library grows. A system that works for a few dozen images can quickly fall apart once you’re dealing with thousands. At that point, flexibility matters more than simplicity. This is where BudgetPixel’s approach stands out. Folders give you structure, nested folders let that structure scale, and upcoming collection support adds another layer of classification without forcing you to choose one method over another. You organize your work the way you think, not the way the platform dictates. There’s no single correct way to organize creative assets, but some ways age better than others. Choosing tools that grow with your workflow means spending less time managing files — and more time creating.