hi
Is it possible to organise shapes somehow?
Here is what i mean. I did a small trace of an image in photoshop some time ago, and now id like to use inkscape for that now. My making of a trace involed a lot of shapes which i did readjust a lot of times. Now, how i did organise them in photosop was easy - with layers menu i could group selected shapes, and name each of these (most of times only groups names are meaningfull but thats beside the point). Now adjusting specific shape was easy, i could make unwanted groups invisible and easily iterate through interesting group.
Is that somehow doable in inkscape? I noticed that there are no entries for created paths/objects with layer menu so i assume no. Is that so? I fear that after nth shape/path my vector is going to be one big mess, perhaps there are other ways to manage shapes in inkscape?

Just to make sure this is how you're doing it, it's best to use the layers dialog, instead of the buttons on the bottom and in the tab. To open it, press shift+ctrl+L.
In the layers dialog, when you make a new layer, (plus sign) you have the option to place it below, above, or "as a sublayer of" the current layer. Try using that third option.

Inkscape only has layers. Layers in Inkscape can contain multiple object. There is no visual representation of how objects are arranged on layers beyond what you see on the canvas.

There are keyboard shortcuts to make it easy to raise or lower objects in the stack or between layers.

i see, thanks for info
anyways, as that is not popular way to organize shapes/paths (otherwise i image that would be incorporated), perhaps im not doing something as i should

how do you mange your objects in larger vectors?
perhaps keeping only a handfull of shapes (each in own named layer) by merging smaler parts together?
or perhaps its not that much of an issue for you?
any sugestions? experiences?

The best way to break up a drawing into layers is through trial and error Sometimes I've created layers for flats, shadows, highlight and other times I've split it up into parts, such as right arm, left leg, etc. Sometimes rather than creating layers on categories I've created layers as I've identified areas that would be better managed on their own.

My advise if you are learning is to not create too many layers to begin with and add layers as you identify them. It might mean that you're requently re-organising your drawing, but it's the best way to learn.

I don't know what your trace result looks like, but if you have more than one object with the same style (colors and stroke width) you can combine them into one path, so they become one object, becomes easier to handle them.

Definitely use Layers dialog, you can keep it docked on the right of the window so its a one click hide/unhide etc.

A lot of requests were made for adding objects list in the layer dialog (like Photoshop or Illustrator) and developers are aware of that issue. Some argue that adding that list to the layers dialog would complicate it visually and reduce usability. Inkscape has XML editor (Edit > XML Editor or Shift + Ctrl + X) where you can see the document tree, layers, groups and objects within them. So XML editor might be the logical place where to implement better interface for objects list.

You should use XML editor, even though there is no color sorting it's very much what you're asking for. Make that window smaller and keep it open, I keep it to the right of the screen. Change every objects ID to something more meaningful to you, like "arm" or "background" instead of "path6438". You can do it by right-clicking on the object and choosing Object Properties, edit the ID entry and hit Set button. You can also change it in XML editor.
Now you can see the list of the objects in a tree in XML editor with your IDs (which are like names in Photoshop).
<svg:path id="arm">
<svg:path id="background">

Of course, when you select and object in XML editor, its automatically selected in the drawing