Is there a way to organize a icon collection to allow for easy searching?

Question

Is there any way of organizing a icon collection so that it easier to find needed icons?

For example:

• the program needs a save icon
• there are 5 icons collections on your HD that have a save icon and there are 5 more collections that don't have a save icon (but you don't know that)
• do you browse through each icon collection?
• run a search (assumes files are named consistently)?

Would it be ideal to have some sort of organized directory (printable?)?

UPDATE

My process so far:

1. Use XXCopy to merge all icon folders into one folder. Syntax = xxcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\jm\My Documents\Icons" "C:\Documents and Settings\jm\My Documents\All_Icons" /s /sr
2. Use Contact Sheets to add all files from the super folder and then export out contact sheets for all the images. This should sort them alphabetically.
3. Print and put in a binder -> now to find the actual file all you need to do is browse the binder, find the filename, and then search via Windows for the actual folder location.

Answer 1

In Visual Studio, there is a ZIP file with icons organized in folders. The organization is mostly by filetype and image size, is pretty messy, and contains many duplicates, so you should probably not follow their example.

However, they provide a HTML file in each folder that shows the icons in that folder in a nice readable list (better than Explorer's standard preview). You could do something similar, but maybe provide a table instead, for example with one column per collection, and one row per "concept" (e.g. save icon).