How to get all those photos on your scrapbook layout

In this age of digital cameras we have the facility to take multiple photographs of a subject… and frequently do! We no longer have to worry about the cost of processing a film and I for one, take lots of photos, meaning to delete most of them, just keeping the few best ones!

Doesn’t happen like that though does it?! I take loads of photos… I look through them and make the obvious deletions like blurred shots. But then I realise I have taken the equivalent of what we used to call a “whole reel” of film and actually I want to keep them all!

You know… the ones where somebody is pulling a funny face, or a natural pose that is slightly out of shot. You end up with lots of similar photos, but just slightly different enough to want to keep them all.

Well, you can’t print every one and scrap them all! Even if you were willing to create that many pages - they would make a rather boring scrapbook album wouldn’t they?

Well the very reason for your huge number of photographs (ie they were created digitally), can actually be a benefit … you have the capacity to print out these numerous photos in whatever size you like!

Now I am assuming you have, or have access to, a printer of some sort. You can very easily print a larger picture of the one you like most from a set of photographs and then print a series of smaller ones.

This is what I did for the scrapbooking layout “You & Me” above. And it is the easiest way to achieve multiple pictures on a page, ie a straight strip of 3-4 pictures.

To get some idea of the size of the pictures I need for my layout (the one above is 8x8) I open up ‘Word’ and using a line drawn to show the 8x8 approximate length of the page (instead of the whole A4 – you’ll see why in a mo!), I place the pictures onto the page to see how big they are, and reduce/crop them till I am happy.

Then, I can delete my line and tighten up my pics to the top of the A4 sheet, I then place any other pictures of which I would also like a copy and hey presto, I have used an A4 sheet of photo paper without wasting any (or very little anyway).

I did post about using a word processor program to print photos a short while ago in the post about scrapbooking ourselves - click here.