I think after the last few times i've downloaded undies that are in all categories i've finally snapped into wanting to knife in the back the creators who think that when they make something it needs to be in more than one sub category.

There are 6 different categories for teen-young adult-adult and elder:

Everday, Formal, Undies, PJ's, Athletic and Swimsuit

The problem again, is with creators not taking the time to pick a single category and sticking with it, so we as players have to take our time and fix it (if its worth it). To something more specific.

We're going to use two tools, SimPE ver. 0.46 or higher, and Sims2pack Clean Installer ver. 1.5.1.4

A. Make sure your games not running and startup Clean Installer. What we're going to do now is seperate your clothing from the rest of your downloads "temporarily" so that the processes dont take forever and a day to complete while using SimPE's scan folder function.

1. Uncheck the box that says "Preview images"
2. Choose directory downloads.

Clean installer will than start scanning your downloads folder and subsequent subfolders for all of your custom content in that directory structure. You can tell when its completed when the word "downloads" is no longer grey and the choose directory is able to be clicked again, but dont do that, its finished and now we can move on.

3. Click the grey bar that says "Type" .. This will sort the files into their different types so that we can find all the files we're looking for.
4. Move the slider down until you find the first type of file that is 'Clothing'.
5. Click that first clothing type file so that it is now highlighted.
6. Hold the shift key down and find the 'last' file that is of the type 'clothing'. Then click it.

What you've just done was highlighted all of the clothing type and now its ready to do something with it? .. wait, what? we're still in clean installer, .. again we're just going to move the clothing to its own subdirectory to save ourself a little time with the simpe processes.

7. Right click one of the highlighted clothing and it will give you some options, Enable Package, Disable Package, Remove Package and Move to, we're concerned with the Move To.
8. Click on the Move ->, than it opens up a subpanel and you than want to click on "New"
9. It will than ask for a new subfolder name and we're going to name it "RECAT", just so that we're following on the same page.

It will now move all those clothing file type that you block selected and put them into that folder named RECAT.

Cool, we've now seperated the clothing from the rest of all the other downloads, lets move onto the SimPE portion.

B. Load up SimPE, SimPE is a very very very useful tool in doing all sorts of things and well, this is the one we're going to focus on, scanning the folder RECAT with all the clothing in it, check out the thumbnails and recatagorize that clothing to appropriate places.

1. The 2nd option at the top is is "Tools" click that than move down to "Scan Folders", it will now open the scan folders plugin, this is going to be what we're primarily going to work with.
2. At the top, you'll see the words in a drop down box labelled "Download Folder" well thats all good in fine, but we moved the clothing into a subdirectory, so what we're going to do is click the drop down box until you see a "..." The "..." means to actually pick which folder we want to use.
3. When a new window appears asking you which folder to choose, find the one in the sims 2/downloads called RECAT the one we created earliar, highlight it, than choose OK.

Now, it will still say ... above in that drop down list, but just remember you chose the directory RECAT so just have faith that it knows that its there, .. it knows.

4. In the lower half of the scan folders plugin are 3 tabs, Scanner Settings, Operatives and Cache. Make sure that the tab Scanner Settings is chosen.
5. Choose these options and uncheck all the rest, Choose "Thumbnail Scanner" and "Clothing Scanner" Everything else again should be unchecked.
6. At that point when your ready, go ahead and click that word "Scan" in the upper right corner, OR the scan button.

This is going to take awhile, what its doing is reading or creating thumbnail preview images for each and every file that you have in the RECAT directory, .. remember that reason we used clean installer? well this is it. Because its having to do all the work in creating thumbnails for us to view it would be 3x maybe 10x longer in time if we had it do your entire downloads.

Seriously, dependant on how many custom content clothing you have, you might as well go watch a movie for a little while. Play with your children who miss you cause your sitting at your computer all day, or that pet that requires some attention and/or husband or wife. For me, so far 30 minutes have elapsed and its not even half done.

OKAY! Once its completed your folder scanner will update and you will see 5 columns of information, Filename, Enabled, Type, Ages and Categories.

7. Sort the list that appears by Categories, that is, go to the column that says catagories and click the word catagories at the top of that column, it will now display the entire list by catagories.

Just to get you familiar with the operations tab, click on the Operations tab in the lower half of your Folder Scanner, than scroll down that box until you see the portion designed for the "Clothing Scanner" You will now see set Ages: and set: Categories: and options for that, thats what you will be using at this point.

8. With the operations panel open and ready to set Categories, find the first file in your folder scanner that has multiple categories, .. usually at least for me it was one that showed "Undies/Swimsuit" click that file and now we can do an 'operation' on it.

Look at the name of the file, does it have the word swimsuit, or bikini thats a real big topoff on what it actually is.., in the lower right hand corner you'll see a nicer view of the thumbnail. Sometimes creators will put the acronym SW or UND or EVR or ATH etc to denote what the clothing is so use your better judgement, the trick is to at least try to get as close as you can to where the clothing should actually fit in.

9. In the operations menu, choose a single, most appropriate category that that article of clothing should fit into. In my case, it had the word "swimsuit" in the filename, so I uncheckmarked the "undies" box.
10. Click the word "set" in the word "set Categories:"

What this does it actually create a .bak fie of that file so you have a backup, AND it makes the changes that you did. Big warning though, it does NOT update your current scan, so what happens after you click Set is that it reappears as if you didnt make any changes, .. ignore that. It made the change but you didnt do a re-scan and well heck it'll take forever to do another re-scan so just move on to the next file.

And at this point, you've got the basic idea, .. head through all of those files that have multiple categories and choose one.

WITH the exception of NUDE clear clothing. I have clothing that is in multiple categories for a purpose, thats the nude clear clothing, so that when I create a sim if I want a particular say undies for him to just be nude instead of wearing undies, it will stay there. You dont need to change that one, just move on to the next. (file usually has the word "nude" in it).

C. Cleanup and checking time.

Now what we want to do after we've made all of our changes is do a rescan of the folder, (this time without thumbnail checking) and verify what we've done is done.

1. Move the lower left hand tab in the folder scanner over to the left to Scanner Settings, and uncheck mark the Thumbnail scanner, so that the only thing it has checked is Clothing Scanner.
2. Click the Scan Button, .. you will notice this doesnt take as long as before, quite fast actually.
3. Verify that Categories tab, click it, it sorts them all again and notice that the files you've edited will only have that single category you have chosen.
4. Your done with SimPE, go ahead and just close that program.
5. Load up Sims2pack Clean Installer again, its time to move the changed clothing back to the downloads main folder.
6. Uncheck the box labelled preview images AND uncheck mark the word box labelled Recursive.
7. Move the dropdown box down to the word "RECAT" instead of Downloads. Now it will start scanning that particular directory and you will notice that its all clothes.
8. Click the first file on the list, hold the shift key down and than click the last file on the list, *marking* them all, highlighting them all.
9. Right click one of them than choose Move To.

At this point you will notice that the actual directory Downloads isnt available, so we're going to have to "browse" for that upper directory to move the files back to it.

10. Choose browse, than search for your downloads directory than double click it open click OK.

It will now move all of your clothing files, back into your root downloads directory where they should be. As a bonus, you also now have .bak files /backups/ of all that you have done still inside the RECAT directory.

Go ahead, start your game up and notice how things are looking alot cleaner in your clothing and categories, sure you'll have one or two in the wrong places, but now you know how to edit those with SimPE and fix it yourself where you want it to be.

.. If you use the boolprop testingcheatsenabled true, and shift-n while choosing clothing, if you move your mouse over a piece of clothing you can actually find the filename of which that is than move on from there.