Hi I'm building up quite a lot of part-illustrations, cliparts or sub-elements of a project that I may use one or more times.
I use Digikam for my photograph management. But I have no system for managing these individual graphical items. They are distributed around my other illustrations. Either I remember where I used it,... or it is lost.

Can someone recommend a system to help me store, sort, find and use my items? Visually naturally.

Thanks.

There are more approaches to this. I love DigiKam for photos, I've never tried it for SVGs.

If you don't mind sharing with other people you can upload to openclipart
https://openclipart.org/

You can create a library of symbols:
Creating symbol libraries in Inkscape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdaGB0zCdHw

Inkscape Open Symbols
https://github.com/Xaviju/inkscape-open-symbols

I'm sure there are more ways too!

I might not understand your problem very well. Can't you just put them all in one folder?

Here's the first part of a 2 part tutorial about creating a different kind of library with Inkscape. (different than a symbols library)
http://verysimpledesigns.com/vectors/in ... rders.html

I just use the Windows file manager (Windows Explorer). It's always been sufficient for me. You can set it to display just a list of files, or you can set it to display thumbnails. I would put all the individual items into their own folder, and set it to display thumbnails. But I do understand that dedicated photo managers may offer more or better features. It seems like your photo manager should be able to display thumbnails.

Another tip might be to give them names which help you to remember what they are, if you don't have thumbnails and you're only looking at file names. File names like "path1234.png" or "groupXYZ.svg" aren't helpful. But names like boat.png or daisy.svg, can help you to remember. Or rather then naming them something about what the image is, I might name them after the purpose they serve, if that's how I think will be easier for me to remember. For example, when I made a couple of drawings for the recent About Screen Contest, I named them "aboutA" and "aboutB". Looking back, I probably should have used "about092A.svg" in case I participate in the next version's contest.

brynn wrote: Can't you just put them all in one folder?

Thanks. Digital asset manager tools lets you search, navigate, preview and re-use your items very easily. As well as adding new items and optionally tagging or categorising them without a lot of work. These items are can range from a complete artwork right down to a small element of a drawing. So this is not about managing "files".
Some people are prepared to spend time preparing this information. And others want to spend no time. The tool should help them both.
As an example, a lot of my drawings have faces and eyes and mouths. I want to look through the ones I've already drawn to save me doing the same thing again. I'm not prepared to put much time in tagging or naming each item, but I usually have usefully named layers already. And some items I know I'll be re using a lot. possibly in the same project too. So I would wish to place them somewhere I can easily find it.

A digital asset manager tool would be a single interface to do it all. And visually.
It would let me create categories in a catalog file. It would scan a folder of drawings and present the drawings or Layers or Groups. Anything of interest can either be re-used directly, or marked with a meaningful tag or placed in a category. A more serous one would let multiple users share catalogs.

The symbol sets are interesting, but need too much preparation and file management.

As well as resources, drawing management with versioning is often needed. At the moment I save drawings under a new name with incremented numbering, in case I need to go back to a previous version. Boat 1.svg, Boat 2.svg, ...

You could have a look at this list and try some of them out. Let us know if any of these is good for your purpose:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital-A ... t-Software
(it's in German - the English counterpart of the page doesn't list any software. I don't know how up-to-date the list is)

I would start with taking a look at the open source programs, and check out their features.

Another place to ask would be on the Inkscape user mailing list. A couple of designers hang out there and could tell you what they do/use.