I love to scrapbook but unfortunately for me and most of you out there, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the projects on my list. So, I’ve disciplined myself to scrapbook isolated major life events like our trip to Europe, a Disney vacation, first birthdays, a special anniversary, a gift for someone, etc. However, I still felt a bit of Mom guilt for not having a scrapbook for my daughter after her first year. But then, I finally figured out the ease and beauty of digital scrapbook albums! Guilt be gone!

I just received the scrapbook chronicling my daughter’s third year the other day in the mail. I was thrilled with the result but getting to that point still took a little time and effort. First off, you have to find a company you like. I’ve tried a bunch of them and finally settled on Shutterfly.com. I liked the variety of layouts they offer, the selection of book and page designs, and I like the interface for creating the books. The end product is also high quality and even better than it is pictured in the online preview.

Next, you need to pick out your photographs and upload them. I realized after doing this last, very large album, that I have been doing this wrong for a couple of years now. Until now, I’ve been waiting until right before my daughter’s birthday and then I have gone through all of the pictures we’ve taken over the last year and picked out my favorites of her to add to the album. Then, I start them uploading and then do some laundry for a while while I wait. This is just wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels. At the very least, after I download pictures from my camera to my laptop, I should go through and pick out any that I would like to add to her yearly album and copy those pictures into a separate folder labeled with the year. That way, when it comes time to do the album, I can skip all the effort of going through all the the different folders from the past year. As I was relating this revelation to a friend over lunch the other day, she said I should take it one step further. Why not go ahead and upload them to a folder on Shutterfly as I go along? That way, I also am not having to upload a hundred pictures all at one time. Brilliance, simple brilliance, my friend. I guess I could even start building the album as I upload but they always keep adding new book designs and layouts so I wouldn’t want to be mostly finished with an album and then see something even cooler I could do. This year, I have vowed to upload the photos as I go along instead of waiting. I’ll let you know next April if I actually manage to do this or not.

Now that the hard part is over, the fun part begins. I won’t go into too much detail here because every online program has its own interface but I do offer a few tips:

• Take the the time up front to look at all the possible layouts. This way, you can plan how many images you are going to group onto a page or if you want to highlight a particularly good photograph by doing a full bleed.
• I like to unify all of my pictures and pages by choosing the same shadow effect for all of my images. I am a big fan of the simple white box around the image.
• I also stick with one font and one font color to add to the overall cohesiveness of the book.
• Upload a few more pictures than you think you will need or want as well. This way, if you need another shot to finish out a multiple photo layout of the same event, you will already have it.
• Make sure that the images are cropped the way you want them in the album layout. There’s usually an option where you can move around the cropping frame on your picture to get just the part you want. Often, the automatic selection isn’t the best.
• Save often! I repeat, SAVE OFTEN!

My last favorite thing about online scrapbooking is that you can make multiple copies with the click of a button. I made albums for my sisters-in-law featuring our family Thanksgiving down in Florida. It was nice to spend a lot of time creating the album for all of us but even nicer to just select Quantity: 3 when it came down to ordering. You can’t do that with a paper scrapbook!

For more tips and ideas on digital scrapbooking and to learn how to scrapbook the simple way visit

www.Keep-It-Simple-Scrapbooking.com

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