How to manage 1,240 layers

So far I've been trying to group the objects into colors or component groups such as tires...or body parts....

That is the fundamental fallacy of the "auto-magic" beginners (are often led to) expect from auto-tracing features: There is no intelligence in auto-tracing.

You see a tire as a tire. You see the body parts as body parts. The auto-tracing algorithm sees none of that. It just sees a rectangular array of pixels. It then tries to draw a path surrounding each cluster of similarly-colored adjacent pixels. It knows absolutely nothing about shape. It doesn't know tire from body. It doesn't even know that a tire is round or that a truck body is boxy.

So if you want to "group the objects [the vector paths that result from auto-tracing] into colors" you can do that by the steps described in Post 8. But if you want to group the paths that comprise the tire or the body or any other component of the truck, you will have to tediously select them, because nothing in the program knows which paths comprise which parts of the subject.

When you draw something deliberately, intelligence is involved. You organize the paths of the drawing into meaningful parts of the subject as you go.

This is why the proper use for auto-tracing (as it predominately exists today, with no shape-recognition intelligence) is almost always as a last resort for use in limited special situations. Its result is far and away most often sub-standard for anything properly called vector-based illustration.

Auto-tracing negates the advantage of vector-based graphics (resolution independence) in the first place, because it just swaps a vector version of scale-dependent ugliness  (jagged vector paths of meaningless shape) for the raster version of scale-dependent ugliness (visible square pixels).

JET

roncurington  wrote OK, so I just did an "Image Trace" on a jpg of a truck.

Unfortunately, that may have been the wrong thing to do.

It was a reasonably simple image. Not a photograph. I set the trace to 16 colors and it gave me 1,234 paths / layers.

Yes, no matter how simple the image, image trace does not necessarily produce something that could be called a vector "conversion;" but rather carries out an "interpretation" of the image, then produces a corresponding stack of vector objects approximating what was "seen." Where you might think perhaps one of the wheels on your truck would/could be drawn from scratch convincingly using 3 or 4 vector objects, image trace may deliver 3 or 4 hundred objects.

Needless to say that's a nightmare to try and manage. Is there some way to simplify the management of this many layers? So far I've been trying to group the objects into colors or component groups such as tires / black & gray or body parts / blues, greens etc. but it's still a monster of a challenge to manage or to even work with. Near impossible.

Yes, this is what you have to compare with rebuilding it manually. If the original graphic was simple enough for you to settle for 16 colors, it's quite likely you could achieve a much better result in less or comparable time by redrawing and/or tracing manually.

Are they Layers or Paths?

The Bring to Front Shortcut is Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + }

Does the trace look like how you want? You can undo and try with fewer colors and different settings. Go to Window > Image Trace to get to more options. You can also expand the result and go to Object > Path > Simplify... to reduce the number of points. The more points there are the more it will affect performance.

It's not 1200 layers, just 1200 objects.

Your only chance is to group them.

You can of course open the layers panel preferences and set it to show only layers. Maybe that is what you want.