My wife Nancy has been collecting machine embroidery designs for years — .pes files for her Brother machine, thousands of them, scattered across Google Drive in folders and zip files. Finding one design meant digging forever.

I asked Muse, my AI assistant, to build her a gallery. Here's how it went.

Tools

• Google Drive (where the files live)
• Muse (Meta's AI assistant — it did the cataloging and built the gallery)
• A Chromebook to browse it on

Steps

1. Pointed Muse at Drive and had it catalog every loose .pes file — filename, stitch count, thread colors.
2. It turned the catalog into a visual gallery: a thumbnail of each design, filename underneath, tap to enlarge, and a button to open the file in Drive.
3. It found 1,216 designs hiding inside zip files Nancy had forgotten about, and pulled them out as loose files.
4. It weeded out duplicates — 412 second copies gone. The rule we used: same filename AND same stitch count AND same thread count means a duplicate; if any of those differ, it's a different version and stays.
5. Moved everything into one Drive folder, "Nancy's Embroidery Designs" — 22 folders, 3,881 files, all in one place.
6. The gallery lives in Muse's Library with a gold star in the sidebar. Nancy opens it from her Chromebook and finds a design in seconds.

What I asked for, in plain words

• Build a visual gallery of Nancy's .pes files so she can browse and search them.
• Look inside the zip files too — there are designs hiding in there.
• Get rid of duplicates, but only when the name, stitch count, and thread count all match.
• Put everything in one folder called Nancy's Embroidery Designs.

Lessons

• Only loose .pes files show up in a gallery. Zips are invisible until you open them.
• Don't rename the files — the original filenames are how Nancy recognizes them.
• Duplicates aren't always duplicates: same name with a different stitch count is a different version.
• Moving folders in Drive doesn't break the gallery links — the links point to the file itself, not its folder.

End result: 3,288 designs in 205 sets. She finds what she wants in seconds now.