Still waiting on one person to review flying submissions. If I can’t get them to by tomorrow afternoon, their opinion may be discounted a bit….
@Chopsticks
It’s a simple ritual that occurs over several sessions and requires gin, tonic syrup, seltzer, and a lime.
But more seriously, I got an organization system worked out that largely splits the collab into 15-20 groups that (usually) contain approximately 50 submissions each. And by submission I mean one image - since a lot of submissions contain 2-3 characters, each group typically ends up having between 60-90 characters total.
When I start assembling a collab image, I start by downloading all the submissions into a single “working” folder. I then go through and find all of the (approved) flying characters and move them into a folder named “flying”. Then I go through and look for images that were request to be put together (like “please put image 1234 and image 5678 next to each other”), and put those into individual “cluster” folders - that’s how I ensure that those images are kept together when I place the in the image.
Now that all that sorting is down, it’s time to start assembling.
On my computer, I create folders for “First Row” and “Second Row”, and then go through all submissions and individually hand-select the images that go into those folders. This is because the characters in the first two rows tend to be fully visible head-to-hoof, so I look for characters that have fairly consistent proportions and sizing to keep anything from looking out of place.
Once I have approximately 60-65 characters in both of those folders, I use Photoshop’s “Load Files Into Stack” feature to load those two folders, which opens each image and merges them into a single workspace, with each image on a separate layer. I then create “First Row” and “Second Row” folders in Photoshop and put the respective layers in there:
After that, I start building out the individual groups. I create a group folder on my computer, such as “Group 7”, then randomly select ~50 images from the “Working” folder, drag them into the “Group 7” folder, and use “Load Files Into Stack” to import the contents of that folder into the workspace, and put them all in a layer folder that’s also named “Group 7”. Then I just arrange them into any gaps behind the preceding role:
This makes managing the layers very easy, since I’m only working with approximately 50 layers and approximately 60-90 characters at a time. It also makes it easy to keep track of which images have been added to the collab, as anything in the “working” folder hasn’t been selected yet, while anything in a group/row folder has been selected and imported.
More importantly, this approach is also extremely fail-safe - if Photoshop crashed while I was working on Group 12, for example, I would just have to reload the PSD, delete Group 12 in Photoshop, and then re-import the Group 12 folder from my computer - that will re-import the exact same images, so I can be certain that nothing accidentally got skipped or duplicated.
