Organization Fun (Part 1) — As yet unsettled

If your work closed for about three weeks it gives you a shit-ton time to do stuff. If, like me, you have more than a decade of photos (more about that later) and movies to organize, hey, you should get to them.

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First, movies:

Back when iTunes sucked more and did absolutely everything for all kinds of crufty, everything’s-an-iPod-right? reasons, it functioned differently in really only one way that matters to me: the way it displayed movies.

I’m fundamentally bothered by disorganization and I’m a movie buff and I’ve always collected (hoarded) movies (VHS → DVD → digital copies). Remember Delicious Library? I bought it a decade ago just so I could organize my books and DVDs virtually, too….

Because iTunes would allow one-sheet style cover images, I would modify the data of each of my movies by finding and including posters (or, in worst cases, something similar – DVD art, lobby card scans, whatever else). This made iTunes display my collection in a way that looked, A, amazing, and, 2, like something from a well-stocked movie house – rather than a collection of random thumbnails of random sizes uglily displayed in a way that was surprisingly difficult to browse.

Sadly, it no longer does this.

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As with the TV layout, iTunes now displays everything – or at least TV and movies – inexplicably sideways. This means, anything not downloaded from the iTunes Store just shows up with any random thumbnail from the show/movie. This is ridiculous. And none of the art I added is worth a bucket of piss in hell or whatever that saying is.

*They don't want it to be like it is but it do*

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That said (complained about), looking for interesting posters each time I added a movie to my collection did get to be tiresome. Turns out, for a lot of movies, there just aren’t good posters. For a while, I considered mending this by creating a Penguin Books-style template that I could fill in any way I pleased (maybe with pointillized stills from each movie, etc.). But, as I’m not a graphic designer, I never had any idea as to what this would look like. And I never wanted to start it before figuring that out, because having it change over time would annoy me. (The Criterion Collection did this a couple times back in their DVD-release days and I could never get beyond the cases not all matching on my shelves.)

But sometimes fate – in the form of software updates – forces one’s hands. And that’s what happened with the new TV app’s appearance and iTunes’ dissolution. Confronted with the entirely new display-style, and the slate having been wiped clean, I had to find a solution, because those thumbnails just aren’t gonna fly at all.

So this is what I came up with:

That’s 200-point Futura Bold, where size allows – and the largest possible size where it doesn’t. The colors are vaguely reflective of the movies where I could think of a way to reflect some aspect of the movies – the orange and black of Harley Davidson’s logo; the blue-and-gray/silver of the police. And different shades of black, white, and/or gray for movies in black and white.

This accomplishes two additional somethings: There’s a bug when scrolling the Library view where the titles sometimes don’t appear. That bug can live as long as it likes; my solution covers it. And, because I’m using grayscale for black-and-white movies, it’s much easier to scan for them or to ignore them when scanning for something in color.

So there you go – some productivity. Takes less time than looking for posters. I can make and exportefive to ten of them in just a few minutes. And if I want to change them, it’s basically just minor adjustments to a few layers in Photoshop. (I probably should’ve used Illustrator….)

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I started this organization and post back when my company was closed for three weeks (originally planned for just two, before a third week was added). It was then open for two weeks, minus weekends which were inexplicably closed. And now I’m a week into a month-long closure. So, yeah – I’ve taken my time finishing this post. I’m about halfway through with the task itself.

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