How do you guys organize your creatives for retrieval? (5)
Hey Guys,
Any one here us S3 for storing your creatives or do you just use them off your system?
How do you guys make it easy to find your stuff later on your system?
From my "spying" i notice alot of people name their creatives AF1234.jpg
How would you find that later on?
Im just curious, bc i started doing
AFF->AdultBanners->DatingCreatives300x250->DescriptiveFileName.gif
AFF->AdultBanners->DatingCreatives315x300->DescriptiveFileName.gif
Now im starting to think if i should upload this stuff to either Google Drive or Amazon S3 for storage so that if my system crashes im not SOL...
Just use Dropbox in the beginning you can use the free plan and got everything synchronized. Personally I use a folder for let's say adult images, divided into categories such as milf, blowjob, animated etc. for pictures and for creatives I normally save them in a separated creatives folder for each campaign including the PSDs to make changes on the fly.
Backups are definitely a very, very good idea. Offsite backups are also a good idea unless you have a miraculous "immune to fire, flood and theft" external hard drive 
Personally I use Dropbox (with the "keep everything forever" option) plus a big external drive. Dropbox uses S3, but it's a lot friendlier than interfacing with S3 directly.
If you really want the bulletproof option, Amazon Glacier is the way to go, but it's neither cheap nor terribly friendly.
As for organisation, I tend to store in folders by TRAFFIC_SOURCE/OFFER/CAMPAIGN/AD_SIZE/
I like using adobe light room for organization. I can import my entire creatives folder then tag them individually since sometimes an image makes sense in multiple folders. It's then really easy to make a smart folder with all the tags that make sense for what I'm looking for and I'll export them to a new folder leaving all the originals intact.
I have smart folders setup that recognize pics that need to be tagged so adding new stuff goes pretty easily.
Might be a little pricier than some options, I had a copy from previous work. But you could use the tags concept in a number of programs if that works for you. Pretty sure iphoto has them, it's free.
Dropbox.
My virtual assistants and employees can retrieve graphics out of the same folder.
As far as organization and folder hierarchy goes...
Lets use Adult Dating as an example.
Work -> Adult Dating (Web) -> Ads -> Country
From there are all my 300x250 static images. There are also folders for /animation, /315x300, /leaderboards
I name the folders according to the angles. THe angles are either "tattoo_1" or I name them by color of background "pink_1"
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