viewing my brushes question

[tannersnonni]

I am wondering how you all tell which brush is which when looking around in your folders on your computer. I organize my kits by designer folders and and then a folder for each kit. When I go into the kit I can see the thumbnails of the papers and elements however the brushes don't show anything. Is there a way to be able to see those when you open a folder in a thumbnail type view? I do know about the brush viewer that is a freebie. It doesn't seem to work for me. I have also heard it isn't good to load all your brushes into the preset folder for photoshop as it slows down your photoshop.
Sometimes I just want to look at what I have (and I have tons) to get inspiration for what I want to do.
Any ideas??
Thanks so much.
Maureen

[Christine Smith]

if the abr viewer doesn't work for you, you're a bit sunk unless you want to make yourself a contact or preview sheet with each brush set you've downloaded. You would do this by loading the brush set, using your brush tool to brush a sample of each brush on a reasonable size canvas and save as a .jpg in the same folder as your brushes

while it isn't a good idea to put every brush you've ever DL'd into your Adobe files, you will probably have a number of favorites that are well stored in there and worth the little bit of extra start-up time with adobe.

HTH