Cleaning large font collection

[Lukewilde]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Is there anyway to quickly clean a large font collection? At work they use suitcase so they dont have the problem with thousands of fonts loading up at the same time, but as i am the only one using a mac they won't buy me a suitcase licence and not sure that i want to spend $99 on it.

Any other quick way to clean a collection of around 1900 fonts without just using font book to sort them into folders? As that would take forever and also won't easily solve the loading of thousands of fonts problem, i don't think it's slowing my mac at the moment but could do in the future and i don't like it all being so un-organised.

[rheftmann]

Font Book may not be perfect, but I've regretted every third-party utility I've installed, especially when they turn out to have their own little quirks that make hours of work counterproductive (such as destroying previous organization). Linotype FontExplorer™ X was the least irritating, and I've never fully recovered from installing it.
There's no reason they should slow down your computer after they "load" (when the software launches), which takes a few extra moments, but if you have to stop and find and then activate fonts when you need them, it may be more distracting and time consuming.
Another possibility: less may be more. There may be such a thing as too many fonts (just to kick off the discussion).

[Lukewilde]

Yeah i guess less is more, but with my job i need access to as many fonts as possible really, which is why other people at work use suitcase, for all the different styles. I did try installing the demo of suitcase the other day, but decided to get rid of it pretty much straight away which then made me need to re-install illustrator because of errors which was frustrating.

I guess my best option is to get an SSD so it will all load up faster, just a bit pricey though.

[Birdseeding]

Use a font manager! I quite like NexusFont.