How to organize library of content?

[scottunreal]

After downloading free market place items, megascans, tutorials packages, etc. I have a lot of materials (wood, car, metals, rusted, etc), foliage (dozens of grasses, flowers, ), etc.
Right now these all sit in their individual asset packages and trying to remember where each is, preview it and extract just necessary items into a new project seems to be very time consuming and awkward.
Is there a recommended way to organize these on a drive? Ideally something like a catalog where you could see all materials you own, ideally organized in some manner, and an easy method to select and add to a project. I know megascan does this in Bridge and their website for their own items but looking for something generic for all the non-megascan as well.

[Rev0verDrive]

I created a project called “assets”, loaded the market place stuff in it, then organized it there. When I want something I use the migrate tool.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/…ate/index.html

[MostHost_LA]

@Rev0verDrive

I created a project called “assets”, loaded the market place stuff in it, then organized it there. When I want something I use the migrate tool.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/…ate/index.html

interesting approach, my personal issue with that is that it takes up disk space.

Afaik there is no way to view items within the editor that are outside of the project, or in non downloaded packages.
a feature request for such a tool would definitely be a worth ask. The migrate structure already exists and works (mostly?). The next step is to create a metadata file for each project that contains the info for what to download and migrate… I think it would be a really cool addition to the engine functionality…

[scottunreal]

Thanks for the thought about an asset project. Agree with MostHost LA that a metadata with the items, including thumbnail, category, description would be useful.
Then you wouldn’t necessarily have to keep them all on disk. Seems like a browser for many of the unreal things would be useful (materials, foliage, blueprints, models, etc)

[Rev0verDrive]

@MostHost_LA

interesting approach, my personal issue with that is that it takes up disk space.

Afaik there is no way to view items within the editor that are outside of the project, or in non downloaded packages.
a feature request for such a tool would definitely be a worth ask. The migrate structure already exists and works (mostly?). The next step is to create a metadata file for each project that contains the info for what to download and migrate… I think it would be a really cool addition to the engine functionality…

Yeah the asset project isn’t optimum, but it’s all I got at the moment. When I organize the imported assets I dump what I’m pretty sure I’m not going to use to free up space.

[Rev0verDrive]

@EntrpriseCustomr

This is another one of those areas that you have to just wonder ‘how Epic does it’ (manages assets internally)?
The launcher is a poor asset manager and storing lots of small projects or one large one each has pros / cons!
I take screenshots of the Content-Browser as a kind of Manual-Thumbnail / Cheat-Sheet for all the asset packs.
Then store all the assets in external drives anyway as rigs sold atm have miserly SSDs vs HDDs a decade ago.

I mostly keep lots of small projects anyway, that way I can tweak folder names to add more description info at least.
As Marketplace titles rarely match asset folder names exactly, so its too easy to keep downloading the same pack.
Whereas if you have one large project, everything becomes blurred as its hard to trace assets back to their source…
This is something the Marketplace team really need to fix. They burden creators with rules but then ignore this, wtf?

I keep a text document on my “U:/” drive for the assets in my asset project. I have one for my main project, but I don’t maintain it properly.