Good heavens

[sholio]

I've got 522 SGA stories saved to my hard drive. I've never had this happen before, but I think I'm actually going to need to go through and do more organizing than just shoving them into a folder labeled SGA, which is all I've ever done when saving fanfic in the past. It's not necessarily that I haven't read this prolifically in a fandom before; it's just that I don't think I've ever a) encountered a fandom with this many good stories and b) found so many that I wanted to save for re-reading.

The question is, how to organize them? My usual method is to tag the filenames with little notes to give me some vague indication of the content of the file (e.g. labels like "aww" or "slash" or "funny" or "vignette"). There's no real system to it, though -- it's just whatever aspect of the story predominated in my head, so I might have two very similar stories where one is tagged "cute" and the other is tagged "funny" or "nice" or one of the many other highly subjective tags that I use. I guess it would probably be a good idea to separate out the slash from the gen ... and the ones I really liked from the ones that had good parts but weren't that great overall ... hmm.

For those of you who either save stories to your hard drive, or bookmark the ones you liked, what sort of organization do you use? How well does it work for you?

Comments

[ratcreature]

I used sort fanfic in fandom then author folders, which has only a few problems (like where to put xovers and collaborations or series with multiple authors), but often I don't remember the author of a story that I want to reread so I searched the folders by keywords. More recently with the social bookmark/tagging systems I switched to tagging all stories I read, so I can find them again by keywords and pairings. I still save my favorite stories (or just comment to get a copy sent to me when it's in just one LJ post, which avoids saving LJ pages with all the formatting and comments just for a story) because sometimes authors vanish and pull their stuff, and I've regretted not saving too many times in the past, but it's easier to find stuff via tags than on my hard drive.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

You know, that's something I hadn't even *thought* about doing. I've never actually used one of those online tagging sites myself. Honestly they confuse and scare me, little Luddite that I am...