I'm just sorting through my downloads and have 3 different outfits acting as though they're meshless (showing up as a maxis outerwear outfit) although the meshes are right there in the folder same as always? I've double checked just in case they were slaved to masters from a different age category that I may have unwittingly deleted, but no. I'm confused what's causing this. I tried redownloading the mesh from one of them but that didn't help at all. I've never known this happen before in all my years of simming. What could be the issue?

Have you tried redownloading all the files, not just the meshes?

Have you moved any folders around?
It could be if the files have changed place the game can't read them (there's a default character limit of 256 characters, go above this and the game doesn't read the files - it's a remnant from 32-bit systems and with 32-bit games, but apparently this is fixable on 64-bit systems with a bit of tinkering - but you can easily avoid it by using shorter file/folder names and by using shorter paths. Avoiding special characters and spaces in file/foldernames is also adviced, since you're cleaning up your downloads).

Repo'd clothing files are easy to recognize - they're usually below 5 kb in size, because there's no textures or meshes to take up space in the files. Full clothing recolors are usually well over 10 kb and more random in size.

Thanks simmer! I really appreciate the advice.

They're not especially recent downloads so they may take a bit of hunting for, but I'll try and redownload them all and see if that helps.

I'm not sure if I've moved those specific folders. It's certainly possible! I haven't renamed the folders they came in - do you recommend I do? One of the tops not showing up has a folder called 'Moocha_simsrocuted_nintendolover13_Polina_sweaters' - is it more likely to show if I rename it 'PolinaSweaters'?

What you can do just to test is to move the files to the main Downloads folder, and test to see if they show up. If they do, the problem is the character limit (renaming the folder or files, or cutting down on subfoldering will probably help). If they still don't show, it's probably the files.

Also, try to reset the thumbnails if nothing seems to be working (because sometimes these continue to show the wrong ones even if the files are fixed). Use Ctrl + right click to regenerate thumbnails in CAS. Delete the Cigen file to reset thumbnails in Bodyshop (all of them - but you can edit out single ones in SimPE).

Oh, it didn't occur to me that subfolders would make things worse! One of the things I've been working on this week is sorting everything into subfolders, within subfolders, within subfolders... Ironic that 'tidying' has actually screwed things up! I'll try moving the ones with issues into just 'Downloads' and see if they're happier there.

2 of them are back just with shortening the folder names, so that's a good start!

You want to try and not subfolder more than 3 deep or it takes the game longer to read and load. Also if that's the name on just one of the folders "Moocha_simsrocuted_nintendolover13_Polina_sweaters" that is quite long all by itself, if that is down a few subfolders it could easily be too long and stop being read.

Guys, this is amazing - I've cut out just a couple of subfolders and clothing is showing up I'd forgotten I had!! Unfortunately with it is showing up more supposedly 'meshless' outfits, some of which just seem to have obscure names that I can't link to anything in my downloads folder, so although 2 more of my original outfits are showing up I have more to sort out! Its exciting though, like unwrapping presents!

I don't really know what the solution to all my subfolders is though. The ones I have left seem sensible. Eg, Downloads/Body Shop/Clothes/Adult/Female/Everyday/Tops/PolinaSweaters I have 160,0000,000 downloads so I need to catergorize them!

List of spring-cleaning tips here: https://serabiet.tumblr.com/post/61...-downloads-tips
(for #4, numbers are also fine )

Here, too: https://sushigal007.tumblr.com/post...-your-downloads

The programs mentioned (BRU and the Tooltip adder) are very useful for cleaning out stuff, especially combined with Bodyshop. I'm doing most of my CAS cleaning out-of-game thanks to them (ingame testing takes forever...)