How to Organize a Bottle Cap Collection for Mosaic Making

A mosaic plan is only as good as your knowledge of the collection behind it. A few hours of organization — sorting, counting, and photographing — turns a box of caps into material the software can actually plan with.

Sort by design, not by color

Group caps so that identical designs sit together. Software treats each design as its own tile with its own artwork and shading; "fifty blue-ish caps" is not a useful unit, but "fifty of this exact cap" is. Sorting by design also reveals duplicates you forgot you had — and designs of which you own exactly one.

Count every design

Once sorted, count each group and write the numbers down. These counts become your Cap Inventory in the Standalone Version — the per-design quantity limits that keep a physical plan honest. A mosaic planned against real counts will not strand you mid-assembly, short of caps.

Photograph for the library

For each distinct design, take one clean reference photo:

• Square and centered — fill the frame with the cap, face-on.
• Up to 800 × 800 px is ideal for the software.
• Even, neutral lighting — harsh directional light bakes misleading highlights into every mosaic cell that uses the cap.
• One photo per design is enough; the count lives in your inventory, not in duplicate photos.

Store for assembly

Keep designs in separate, labeled containers in the same order as your inventory. When you later follow a Workplan, you will be picking specific designs hundreds of times — retrieval speed matters more than you expect.

Keep the inventory alive

Collections change: trades, finds, and finished projects all shift your counts. Update your Cap Inventory whenever it changes materially, especially before starting a new project. Stale counts quietly turn a reliable plan back into guesswork.