I often find myself wondering if merchants have a secret competition to see who can best hide their products from a search ;)

After all, I have no doubt that to a merchant, all of their products are familiar. But me? I have thousands of files in runtimes (I just checked - over half a million not counting Gen2). Even with 50 different libraries I still have to use search a lot.

So if I want a bikini, I'm likely to search for 'bikini'. I'm logical like that. Any merchant whose bikini I have bought will show up if they called it a bikini. Or bikini top, etc. But if they labelled it UltraTinybkni it probably won't.

And if there is an add-on tex pack called Miniscule For Ultra Tiny, that won't show either.

Apparently I'm expected to have either a) a photographic memory or b) about 500 libraries for every variable, or c) just buy a single bikini so it's easy to find.

No doubt Smith could make their library system better, though I'm still undecided on why hair goes in Character and hair mats go in Pose and why I can't make nested libraries but we'll let that pass for now. The simple fact remains that too many products are simply unfindable by using Search on a generic term for what they are.

And that problerm is even worse when it comes to locating which items have additional mat sets. I've pretty much given up on buying them at all since they rarely have names that gets them into the runtime right next to the base product where I can see them easily, and they also don't show in that search a lot of the time.

I can see an attraction in wanting to keep selling new products but if I have 20 or 30 bikinis, I really don't want to be spending a couple of hours trying to track them down so I can find the best one for a character/scene.

Some merchants are brilliant about it. Some are not. Some get priority when I'm buying new products, some don't. Having spent hours creating a wonderful item, another 5 minutes making sure it can be found easily would seem like a good investment, especially amongst the add-on merchants who could arrange their packs to be right next to the base item.

This isn't intended as a rant. It's intended as an observation from a shopper who spends far too much money because I love the products so much. It won't stop me buying new things if I can find old ones in the runtimes  a few weeks after I bought them. But it sure would improve my productivity.

Now I'm sure you can tell me something simple I missed that would magically reveal all the items I can't find searching for them by logical names?

I never extract a zip directly to any of my runtimes, always extract to external place, rename items to my liking, moving items so it suits my taste, shrinking textures that are to large, removing stuff directly (for example hair colours i will never use).

Even have a temp runtime where items reside before being upgraded to regular runtime members :-).

See the threads

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=4157572&ebot_calc_page#message_4157572

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=4160832&ebot_calc_page#message_4160832

pp12 you can put the pose mat files in the character folder under the bikini. 
best new poser feature evah! 
only helps going forward though.  wouldn't want to back-track all my installed stuff.

i'se slowly moving all my hairs to it's own runtime.  more of a winter activity. :lol:

one nice thing about running in 64 bits, can move files while the renderer is rendering. :)

If just finding the product itself is a problem, the real fun begins when you want to find one of its textures or the obj file to edit them.

I bought a hair prop a few days ago and needed to get rid of some white streaks showing up in renders. Couldn't find either textures or geom file until I opened the cr2 in a text editor to see where the merchant had hidden them.

Turned out the product I bought was called "Crazy Locks Hair" but that name must have been a last minute change, the textures and geometry (and the hair figure itself once it is loaded) are still called "West Park Hair". A bit disconcerting, to say the least.

Quote -  

I bought a hair prop a few days ago and needed to get rid of some white streaks showing up in renders. Couldn't find either textures or geom file until I opened the cr2 in a text editor to see where the merchant had hidden them.

 

And this is why P3DO Explorer is invaluable.  It shows you the exact file structure of what a .cr, .pp2, etc calls for in Geometries and Textures.   Plus you can load items directly into Poser from there thus having two separate libraries open at the same time.

http://www.senosoft.com/

As for merchants and naming, well they have to name it something to differentiate it from the other names in the Marketplace.   I think it's up to the user to set up Runtimes and categorize stuff especially if they buy a lot through the years.   How can every merchant know what each one of us prefers?    I, too, unzip to a Poser downloads folder with subfolders for Clothing, Props, Hair, etc.   Then I copy to whichever Runtime and however I like, many times renaming (to remove exclamation marks, etc).   If I buy a texture pack for a clothing item I put the materials or poses in the same folder where the original clothing's mats are in their own subfolder of course.   Doing this as you buy is not time-consuming but having to find everything after years of downloading and purchasing and random placement will be a nightmare.

Thanks for all the feedback. I haven't used Poser's zip install since Daz started zipping stuff. I just put things in a temp folder and get the runtime out, then copy that to the appropriate library. However it seems I have been too worried about breaking something to hack that runtime apart, renaming and deleting.

Meanwhile, as I pointed out, I do have about 50 libraries so I'm hardly placing items at random. And on the other side of the coin perhaps merchants might consider a potential customer searching Rendo for a specific item. I love this place but their search hasn't always been the best. Would I be able to find your product by searching the marketplace? I know for sure the answer is not always yes because I have done searches knowing a specific product exists here but not remembering what it was called.

If I'm looking for a highly specific item, I'll keep looking even if I have to go back through pages and pages. But if I'm looking for a generic type of product, then I'll choose from what the search shows or shift to Daz, RDNA, CP etc and see what they have. So you could be losing sales by not being easy to find by search.

I do have several other bees in my bonnet, or constructive comments as I prefer to call them. But you'll be happy to know I also have very limited time to post them ;)