***Note: this is mainly only about the Lot Bin in base, shopping or downtown hoods. Colleges are a different animal & have their own Specialty Lots (like Dorms) & other rules about what can/can't be placed there. Still, lots you have packed up from a College town (like Student Unions or Libraries) will be effected, as these will show in your regular Lot Bin too!***
I will say from the get-go that this was NOT my brainchild, as much as I wish it were! It was actually proposed as a speculation by ZepherZodiac over on TJ's Simbology site & things snowballed from there. (I'll post a link to the original thread at the end of this post, but since it tends to wander a bit as threads like to do, I will post the upshot of it here in my own words first.)
Does it drive you nuts that that stupid Lot Bin displays stuff in a seemingly random way, with no regard to what's a residential lot, what's a park or what's a shopping mall?
Well, be driven insane no more! Now you have the power to get that stupid bin to group things the way YOU (not some turkey at Maxis) want! The secret? It sort of depends on what EP/SPs you have...
For Games With Nothing Higher Than The Glamour Life SP
First get a paper & a pen. Now go into your game & write down the lots in the order they appear in your lot bin. Exit the game & go to your LotCatalog folder. (My Documents\EA Games\Sims2\LotCatalog)
Believe it or not, this is one time Maxis used their brains; the lots actually appear in the Lot Bin in numerical order! (Lot cx_00000005 will be the one right before cx_00000006, etc etc...)
To change how the lots show up in the Lot Bin, you just need to renumber them! (Backup the LotCatalog folder first if you feel better about it.)
This works brilliantly (yes, I have done this) & you can get as fancy as you want. For instance, I changed the 3rd digit in the file name to 1,2,3,4,etc if the lot was a resident, park, restaurant, store,etc. (Other people have used systems that include altering other digits according to price & other factors, but I haven't got that deep...yet! )
For Games With Pets Or Later Packs
Virtually the same as above, but with a twist: the lots will load in
reverse numerical order & the date the file was created is now a deciding factor in how it's "ranked" in the bin. So if you make/package a new Community Pool (for instance) after Pets or higher is in your game, that lot will ALWAYS show up at the front of your Lot Bin, despite whatever you try to cleverly renumber it to.
The easiest way to deal with this I found was to run DJ's Compressorizer on the LotCatalog folder; after being "compressed" all your lot files will have the same "born on" date & you can get back to organizing your Lot Bin to your liking. Note that this will remove the EP/SP icons from Pets-and-above Maxian lots. So if you really have a thing for icons on your lots I don't know what to tell you. (Since Delphy's Download Organizer- which I love- hates compressed files, I only used the Compressorizer on the LotCatalog & not my Downloads like it was originally designed for.)
A Strange Alternative Idea
This totally doesn't fit my playing style but it might yours so here goes: a few players have created a Hood solely to store all their lots in. Once set up, they have then deleted everything in their LotCatalog, which (obviously) leaves an empty Lot Bin. When they want to place a lot, they go to their "Lot Hood", place the lot in their Lot Bin, then go to the Hood they want the lot in & place the lot.
That's waaaay to annoying for me, but apparently it speeds up load time on lower end computers. Thought I would pass it on in case it appeals to anyone else. (The idea of a separate hood to test/create/tweak lots in IS something I liked however! )
As promised, here's the link to the original Simbology thread:
http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php/topic,263.0.html
-ZW