This question is related to my previous one - this may sound like a simple situation, but I think I have made something easy complicated.
  I am trying to organize Poser 8's Runtime so all my directories work and aren't a mess. By this I mean that I have the directory "Females", all my female character purchases and freeware, clothing, etc. in one directory with subdirectories for V2, V3, V4, V4.2 and I want to add Alyson to the list.. I don't want her outside the list in Runtime. I want to move around some characters Poser 8 gives me, but I'm just not sure of what I'm doing.
  Here's the part that's overwhelming me. If I want. say, to take Alyson and her male counterpart and put them in the Female and Male directories in Runtime, is there a way to avoid moving them from their place on the hard drive? Everything I have is under Poser 7.
 I know I sound like a complete idiot, but I am not sure I understand the mechanics of this. ::
 
 Thank you in advance,
 White Raven

What you see in Poser's Library window is a direct representation of files and directories on your hard drive.  If you move files on the hard drive, they are moved in Poser's Library window.  If you "move" them from within Poser, e.g. by re-saving to a different folder, behind the scenes, they are re-written to the target directory on your hard drive.

 Thank you for answering so quickly and explaining pjz99! Please forgive me if I am being dense but so there is no way to just organize my Runtime menu in Poser 8 without copying the literal Runtime files? Thank you for being patient, I just started using Poser 8 and enjoy it, I don't want to mess anything up. (I just want to be organized within the program's menu of Characters and suchlike and am a bit nervous fooling with Poser 8.)

  Thank you again,
  White Raven

Your Library window in Poser is really just a listing of files.  I don't know how to say this any more simply.  It's a listing the same way you'd get if you typed "dir" in a DOS shell, or if you open an Explorer window. 

You have the option to set them up as favorites. This does not move anything. In the Favorites, you create any folders you like and put references to things in your runtimes all into the Favorites. This may or may not be what you're after, since it combines everything into a single tree. You won't be able to select a single runtime and see only things from there. Everything in your favorites are always in your favorites.

Theoretically, you're supposed to be able to favorite an entire folder, too. But Poser 8 right now has a bug with that.

When SR1 is out, that will work. You'll be able to select the Alyson folder, then add it to favorites under a Females folder, without having to create a Females runtime. I hope that makes sense.

If you really want a Females runtime, then you will have to either copy or move the files from the various runtime libraries into that Females library. Note that you probably don't want to move files.

There is a further issue that the objects you move or copy from one "library" to another "library" may require access to other objects in the original runtime. You can leave them where they are, or copy them too. If you leave them where they are, you must always have the original runtimes "loaded" into Poser, even if you never browse into them.

Note that I put quotes around the word "library" for a reason. The library of things you see in your library browser is a subset of the files in your runtime. The runtime includes more than what you see. It includes geometries, textures, python scripts, morph data, etc. Lots of things that are behind the scenes. So moving a "library" item (what you see in the library GUI) can work, but if you disconnect the original "runtime" (which houses all the other stuff) the library item can become useless. If you leave the original runtime loaded, then Poser will find those things even if called from a different runtime/library. Or you can tediously track down all the referenced files and move them to the new runtime as well.

I'm just giving background here. I really don't suggest you move anything. I would use favorites for things you use a lot, favoriting entire folders. But as I said, you'll have to wait for SR1 to be able to do that.

 Thank you, pjz99 and bagginsbill! Now I understand. I think I will wait for the favorites to be sorted out. :)

  Thank you again,
  White Raven

Here's another suggestion. Save a cr2 of Alyson inside your Females runtime. :)

 I'm one of those fools who has 60 Gigs of  runtimes.

Once upon a time, I tried loading all of that stuff into a single runtime to get by the issues that bagginsbill explains with the resourse disconnects and the like. Poser (6, I think it was) crashed mightily, unable to shoulder the load.

Question: Is this fixed in Poser 8? That is to say, is there a limit to the size of a single runtime, or is it still advisable to break them up into smaller runtimes? I see the advantage to the favorites system. It appears to do the same thing I was doing with multiple runtimes for organizational purposes without the pathing errors that seem to creep in with multiple runtimes.

So, will it work? Or do I still need to limit my runtimes to, say, 20,000 items each?

Put it this way: My V4 runtime is 24.5 GB and about 28,000 files. Obviously, that's less than half of 60 GB - but I can open Poser to a new doc in about 15 seconds. I'm having no problems with that at all.

OTOH, I'm not having pathing issues, either, and I have 18 runtimes. I prefer it this way in part because it's much more readily obvious what character an item of clothing is for etc.

Quote -  I'm one of those fools who has 60 Gigs of  runtimes.

Once upon a time, I tried loading all of that stuff into a single runtime to get by the issues that bagginsbill explains with the resourse disconnects and the like. Poser (6, I think it was) crashed mightily, unable to shoulder the load.

Question: Is this fixed in Poser 8? That is to say, is there a limit to the size of a single runtime, or is it still advisable to break them up into smaller runtimes? I see the advantage to the favorites system. It appears to do the same thing I was doing with multiple runtimes for organizational purposes without the pathing errors that seem to creep in with multiple runtimes.

So, will it work? Or do I still need to limit my runtimes to, say, 20,000 items each?

I can't think of any limit for Poser 8, even 1 million items in one runtime is fine.

The Poser 8 library does things completely differently than all previous versions of Poser.

Poser 7 did a considerable amount of scanning a runtime looking at things, even if you had never ever looked at them. I don't know all the specifics of Poser 7, but I think all loaded runtimes were scanned and thumbnails analyzed at startup or something really expensive like that. Maybe it only deep scanned the "current" runtime. Not sure. But it was slow to start and you had to wait.

Poser 8 does a quick swipe of the top level of all loaded runtimes. That is very quick. At this point, you can start using it.

Following that, in the background, it looks over the folders you had open in your previous session, and starts populating them. It is doing this without stopping you from using the UI.

It also does this in a smart way. If you had a bunch of deeply nested folders open, but the top level was closed, it doesn't go down to the deep ones, until you re-open the top one. At that point it says "Well, the last time he had this open, he also had these child folders open. He probably wants to see them again." And then it scans those, also in the background.

Thumbnails are not pre-loaded at all. They are loaded the instant that it needs to show them to you. So if you have 20 thumbnails visible in the tree, that's all it has. As you scroll it will discard those and load new ones. As you open folders, it will then grab the thumbnails, but only for the items that you see. If you open a folder with 1000 items, but only 20 are showing, only 20 are loaded. Again, all this happens in the background.

Because it works this way, the effort it makes is the same whether you have your entire library in just one runtime, or 500 runtimes. Organizing runtimes for efficiency isn't possible anymore. It is the same efficiency whether you have 1 giant runtime or 500 little runtimes.

However, for the user, there is some advantage to separating runtimes. You can use the "Show Library" pulldown to focus on just one library instead of combining libraries into the tree viewer, making it easier to navigate within it, since there's nothing else on the screen you need to scroll past.

I deleted everything and reinstalled from scratch.  I set a folder for V2, V3, V4, M2, M3, M4, Animals, Buildings/Props, Shared, and so on, and installed everything into the matching folders, and if certain characters shared the same install i put it in the shared folder, it's at least more organized for me, and it does its job