You can also create sub-folders in the addonPackages folder. For instance like "Looks, Scenes, Clothes, Morphs, Plugins, Hair,..."
If you move Var files into this folders: due to the way VaR files works, VaM will find them there and does not have issues with the file path! It doesnt matters where they are, as long as they are in the addonPackages folder. This will help a little bit if you want to search for a certain Var by browsing manually through the folder hierarchy, but unfortunately not for the usual filtering method.
Yes, I guess besides all those learning-curve related questions, the content organisation is the least obvious, but later the most difficult thing.
Think about this situation:
- You downloaded a big bunch of stuff like looks and scenes.
- To make them work, you have to download a maybe even bigger number of dependencies (some days ago I saw a scene with more than 60!!!! dependencies).
- In those Var files you will have for instance included stuff like textures, morphs, plugins, hair, environments, looks, clothes, aso.
- If you start to create your own stuff, you therefore are able to choose from a large pile of different content. Lets say you will create a ton of looks, each with hundreds of morphs, hair, clothes, makeup, etc from different Var files.
- After a short while you will have a lot of useless stuff, duplicates and different versions of the same item and your SSD space is running low.
- Now you want to delete some of the Var files... but each of them may be a dependency of an other one, or you have used some of its different included contents for your own creations like in the example above.
- Once the number of Var files is big enough, it is nearly impossible (or an enormous amount of work) to go through all of the files to find those dependencies, cross-links and stuff without breaking a lot of content by deleting some of them.
- If you absolutely don't want to put your precious own creations and favourite stuff into danger, you might give up and buy a bigger SSD instead
like me.
The only way IMHO to avoid this is eighter to be extremely organisated, or to keep yourself away from mindlessly downloading too much stuff.
We desperately will need some sort of install- or content manager, which can scan not only Var files, but all of our own created stuff and presets, and through stuff installed in the custom folder, too. Maybe someone is able to create one.