How is one to know what these ARE?

[plastic shine]

Yes, I'm just another person sorting out their Downloads folder. I've managed to do most of it... but some of the stuff, how are you supposed to tell what they are?

I've got SimPE from back in the day when I thought I'd try some modding, but quickly gave up and never learned how to use it. Don't know if that's how you tell or not.

Any help?

[Kristalrose]

I used the Clean installer when I did mine. 

[plastic shine]

No idea what that is.  Details, please?

[Renatus]

I'd bet ten euros most of those are empty packages, maxis items, or duplicates. You can check what they are with the Sims2Pack Clean Installer, which I believe you can find by following links through Mod the Sims 2.

Empty and duplicate packages can be deleted through the Clean Installer. So can any other ones, but empty and duplicate packages one always wants to rid themselves of.

[Brynne]

I spent the last couple days organizing my downloads folder. Clean Installer makes it easy.

I sound like an infomercial. 

[Kristalrose]

For the Clean installer, go to www.modthesims2.com.  Look on the left hand column down the page to see other sites that are hosted by MTS2.  There will be a link there for the clean installer. 

[sgestner]

um...not an expert, but those look like a lot of duplicate files (those things ending with _0001) and sims packages that you may have already installed into your game (those icons with the snowman looking thing coming out of the box).

With the clean installer, just fyi, ('cause I'm and idiot and it took me ages to figure it out) pink lines are duplicate items, you will see the extension _0001 or _0002, etc...good luck.

[ThyGuy]

Alot of them look like meshes to for sims. I couldn't help, I've had bad things happen from custom sim parts.

[plastic shine]

So the sim packages (the icon things) can be deleted as I've already installed them?

[Renatus]

Scan them with Clean Installer and see what it tells you. Empty and duplicate packages can be safely deleted.

[plastic shine]

They don't show up in Clean Installer 

[maxon]

The sim packages can be deleted or stored elsewhere (if you want to archive them) and you shouldn't have lot packages in the downloads folder.  It is probably best to not have anything BUT package files in there but I do know that some people store pictures with the files so they know what everything is.

The files beginning k8 are by Kate of Parsimmonious and are probably skins or walls/floors.  If I was more awesome I might be able to tell you some of the other files names too but I'm not.  Anyway, with Clean Installer you should be able to work out a lot of those.

You can also rename any file except object files (which have to have the same name internally as externally).  I rename a lot of things.  One thing that is helpful is that you can use Homecrafter to rename wall and floor files.  I'd start by taking out everything you know about first (the stuff in sub-folders) and stick the stuff on your desktop.  You get Homecrafter up which will pick up any remaining wall, floor and ground cover files in your Downloads folder.  Find a wall/floor/ground cover, press the edit button (change anything you want to - you don't need to) and save the wall/floor/ground cover.  Homecrater will rename the file Wall_stupidlongstringofnumbers.package or floor_stupidlongstringofnumbers.package but at least you'll know what kind of file it is.

[TaWanda]

The few things I have that don't show up in clean installer are some downloaded sims, and most meshes of course. You could try the datgen download maid  to check for empty or corrupted files.

[jrd]

You can also rename any file except object files (which have to have the same name internally as externally).

Nah. Filename doesn't matter.

[Ellatrue]

often a package with random strings and numbers, not recognized by clean installer as anything else, will just be a sim (because meshes are labeled more often)

I believe that if you open them up in simPE, if you see a category for age data, that means it's a sim

[Li'l Brudder]

The Awesome One says that if the files don't have names, but letters and numbers, you don't need them anyway.

[Hegelian]

Well, you don't need any of it. But often the parts that come with packaged sims, like eyes and makeup, will be given those long numbers as file names by the packager. Out of 7500 items in my Downloads folder, I have relatively few with that kind of file name, probably because I rarely install sims or lots made by others.

As others have said, using the Clean Installer will tell you what most of this stuff is (items that don't show a category are usually meshes). It will not show you the file name, but rather name of the item as given in the item description; but if you hold your cursor over the item name, its file name will appear in a popup tag. You can sort the Clean Installer listing by MD5 by clicking on the column heading, which will put all the duplicates next to each other (since Clean Installer uses the MD5 hash rather than the GUID to identify duplicates). You can also sort by category.

When using Clean Installer to check for duplicates, be sure to check the Recursive checkbox under the dropdown box at the upper right of the application window so that any subdirectories you have are included in the scan.

[nectere]

I must assume that you have already installed all the sims2pack files, the ones with the special icons. You can delete those once they are installed. Empty packages will generally be 1kb or less, so if you choose to look at your file list and show details (view - show details) you can see the size of each of the package files, rarely will you have a hack that will be 1kb, in fact I havent seen any yet, the smallest I have seen is about 3kb.

If you use Clean Installer to look at the folder, hacks will show up in red, duplicate files in pink. Click on the MD5 column to sort by MD5, this will put the duplicates together, I generally will delete the oldest duplicate. Get Clean Installer and run the program and then click browse under choose directory, then you can go to the folder you want to scan. A lot of times the names will show up in clean installer, or you can click on the name in clean installer and it may give info in the box below. If you dont see anything and its totally blank, this is a mesh (generally speaking). Finding out what that mesh is will be the fun part, using Simpe to take a look at each package and viewing the geometric data. I look at the mesh itself in the plugin view to see if I can guess what it is if I can not find any other information elsewhere.

Alternatively I believe if you have cheats enabled in game, you should be able to get the file names while in buy or build mode by hovering over the icons, and in CAS Create a Family screen. To enable this mode in cas, first enable debug mode (cheats enabled true yadda yadda), then go into cas mode and shift N, this will put you in cas debug mode and you can read the files names there by hovering over each icon) This is a time consuming endeavor if you have a bunch to figure out since you will need to make note of each item and its funky name so that you can go find it later and clean it up. Obviously you can not rename these files while in play, unless you want to copy every single file to another folder first and then rename then as you go along, replacing all the newly named files once done.

Anyway...good luck.

And yeah sure you may not need those files with the funky names, or you may depending on what they are. Usually seasoned  creators will give their files sensible names, but homecrafter and bodyshop by default will not unless the creator forces the issue, which many who strictly use those two programs for content creation do not. Hopefully that made sense.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Those .0001 files are almost always duplicates of either walls and floors or of recolours which come with downloaded houses, or of dulicate make up etc. if the house included sims.  |If you used the Maxis installer to install the sims2packs, then there is no check made for duplicated stuff, it is just given the extension so they can both sit in your Downloads, the original and the duplicate!  For this reason I have all my downoads filed by site, I download into a New Downloads folder which is divided into sites, and I use the multisims2pack installer to open wall and floor files in that folder, after which I make sure I put them in the correct folder in the Walls and Floors Folder which I don't have in Downloads, but is a separate folder.  And on top of that, if they don't have a recognisable name, such as BlueWoodFloor.xxxxx.package, then they get their own folder with the name Blue Wood Floor!  I'm anal about my downloads!