Quick Scrapping

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Quick Scrapping

I'm still behind on my layouts. Way behind, like 13 years! The feeling is overwhelming, trying to figure out how I'm going to scrap all those old layouts, while all the new layouts come to mind. Plus, all those photos that just got tucked into digital files on my computer, to be long forgotten. It makes you question yourself, why you even take photos in the first place!

I kept seeing weekly pocket pages on my Pinterest feed and it got my gears moving. Why not throw my photos into weekly pocket pages, journaling bits and pieces of the things I can remember, starting from the first year and working my way to the present. While the original photos will still be in folders, I'll have a nice scrapbook "album" building up. After a year, I can publish them into an actual album and if there's any specific event I want to focus on, I can pull those images and make a more detailed layout. This may eliminate the need to scrap old layouts, altogether.

I'm not sure if this is old news, to everyone else, but my brain seems to think it's a new idea. I feel like I will be satisfied with the thought of having those old photos "scrapped", even if they're not in a traditional page. When I get to my present day photos, I plan to do the same. I'll end up making better use of these two types of scrapbooking.

So far, the plan is to use 12 photo layouts and combine up to 4-5 photos of each event, plus one journal card. I will start with my first year and scrap photos as I find them. They will not be in numerical order (to the months they were taken) and the page might only display the year. I haven't decided if I want to use different papers (with no embellisments) or just neutral one(s) with colorful journaling cards.

What do you think?

Sounds like a great plan! I know the weekly technique is a popular one and that there's even kits based on doing so smiley

The idea appeals to me now that I've got a baby who might want to know what was going on at x-time in his life but as you mentioned, I'm afraid I'd fall behind and become overwhelmed and just never pick it up again. (though, doing nothing isn't helping me either!)

As for the design style, I think that's totally up to you and what you prefer! I, personally, like minimal/clean/simple layouts that focus on the photo(s). I don't use much journaling and I tend not to use very many elements to fancy up my pages but that's just how I like it, for now. My style may change over time and that's fine. I think you should just go with the flow, see what feels right and stop when it looks 'complete'. smiley If nothing else, you'll figure it out as you go, that's part of the fun, I think!

I think a lot of people use pocket scrapping as a quick way to catch up. It both makes room for lots of photos, and also can be quite quick to decorate minimally and feel like it's finished.

It's always great when you get a sudden inspiration of how something can work for you. Just yesterday I was inspired to scrap our trip to Kenya, which was over a year ago, by including basic collage pages for a lot of the photos. Which is not a new idea either, but it suddenly occurred to me that I could do it smiley

Kayl, same here, doing nothing isn't helping. smiley I'm thinking minimal might be great for these pocket pages. Leave the fancy stuff for the more in-depth layouts. Time flies by and if you don't try to get a layout done each week or month, you feel like you're falling behind.

Of course, I sat back in the very beginning, collected scrapbooking magazines, sketching layouts and watching youtube videos on digi-scrapping (as they became popular). Now my youngest stepson is graduating high school, next year, and I have hardly any layouts to show. Not that I planned on giving them to him (he's not really into that), but I wanted to be all caught up before then. Next it'll be graduation, college, serious relationships, marriage/children, etc. Plus, the little guy will be in school and that's a whole new start to the story.

I also want to start printing my photos out, to put into albums and not have everything digitized. I like the traditional aspect for them, even though I prefer digital scrapbook pages. I want others to be able to flip through the original photos too.

Isn't that funny, how something you've seen before, suddenly comes in this new light. This morning, I watched an old scrapbooking video and I thought, why didn't I try that? Like little scrapbook angels whispering in ours ears. lol.

I've even done this pocket page type by months... like 12 two-page layouts for the entire year. And then just focused on special events as 12x12 layouts to be added after each month.
I even recently purchased an IRL album that has the pocket pages to do a type of memorial album of my hubby's and mine beloved first pet as a married couple that just passed away in Nov. We have some videos and hubby is going to upload them and create QR codes that I can add to the journaling block and it could be pulled up on our phones while perusing the album. smiley I guess you could do this with a link to an online album with ALL the extra pics you didn't want to scrap with QR code on the page, too.

Shawna, oh wow, there's an idea. Although I don't know how to do QR codes, I've seen them on scrap pages. My question with that is, how long will they last? Can you do something like that on your own blog and generate a code? Do they require an app on your phone?

I'm sorry to hear about your pets passing. Facebook recently "reminded me" of our 9 yr old puppy that passed a little over a year ago, by showing me pictures of her and my son together. I pretty much avoided the month she passed, but one from two years back, slipped through. I've haven't made a scrap layout for her yet, but I have some videos of her that would work great in those QR codes.

I did a little googling on QR codes, and you can make free ones here.

I think the QR code will always work as long as the site you point it to is live. The QR code is just a different way to save a URL. So if the URL works, the QR code will always take you there.

I like this idea of including a QR code of videos. I'm going to give it a try.

Thank you! I'll check out that site. I think it (QR codes) might have a lot of advantages.

Particularlly, I think the idea of QR codes is reallu fun... I´ve been thinking about it since this topic, and I have this article on my Pinterest since forever for inspiration but never really did it.

Lorien, you should do it, for sure! They look really useful.

I´m like you... Ages behind on my scrapping projects Katherine. Guess I have to finish the photoalbum for a trip I made like... 6 years ago???

Lol, no rush!

I wish I had stayed on top of this a LONG time ago. smiley

I think everyone is behind in scrapbooking. I am actually finding myself doing more now that I am going digital . I have the photo already on my computer and I can just drop them in pages/layout I make. Now just to keep it all together (but thats another thread) .

Hello Katherine, it is so interesting to read this! smiley I have been looking for the perfect way to keep memories forever and I know that I am not alone on this quest. smiley Marisa's pocket pages are the perfect solution and so beautiful. I am still hoping that she will release her beautiful layouts as Quick Pages at some point smiley Violet has an entire collection for pocket scrapbooking here. She also has wonderful templates.

l so like to keep daily records, tho. I can then scrapbook the whole shebang when I have time. Here is a typical example of a daily page of mine.

Of course there are tons and tons of extraordinarily beautiful templates, template albums and collection sets here at DigitalScrapbook.com. Here is one that I love. I am always amazaed at how much I haven't seen here and I have been playing here for a while... I love it when people attribute their layouts, so that I can see which template they used.

Someone who would prefer a more elaborate style could use QuickPages. Marisa has many great Quick Pages here, even entire albums, and so do the other designers.

A rather minimal approach is do-able for me and it is a bit gratifying to finish 3 pages in 15 minutes. It is also relaxing to just let your eyes run on some white space and take in the beauty of your photos and then see how the journal would compliment in color and face....That is why I love the photo on one page, journal on the other, two pager approach.

More often than not the pages are just good as they are and I never elaborate on them at any later point. Depending on where you are coming from in terms of preferences I imagine that it can be a bit brutal at first to settle for a photo on a white background. smiley

I have some freebies for quick scrapbooking on my blog. The Bina Greene Method is called 3 elements and 5 minutes. You can read about it here. I have just finished the 12 page palm trees layered template album which I made for my method of using 3 elements and completing your page within a time frame of 5 minutes or less.

Here is a page with this album

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From my DigitalScrapbook.com Gallery, this is a 6x6 two pager so 12x6 really and not a 12x12 page. You will find the free template here.

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It's great to read about everyone's approaches to memory keeping. I love hearing new ideas for quick scrapping or simple scrapping.

Personally, I find the process of curating and organizing photos a real challenge. At one time I had 85,000 photos on my computer, so I have spent a lot of time going back and organizing, deleting duplicates and trying to curate it to a reasonable collection. I started building a family archive on 'Forever' so lately I've spent more time curating and working on the archive of photos and memorabilia than actually scrapping anything. I'm trying to tag my photos and include descriptions in the meta data and it's very time consuming.

I've always resisted the idea of being 'behind' so I've never tried to scrap everything or 'keep up' with daily, weekly or even monthly scrapping. Instead I've always focused on theme albums. Currently I'm working on two 'Heritage Albums' where I'm scrapping our family history. I choose to focus here because my mother is 85 years old and need her help! Although I'm an empty-nester now, I took journaling notes during my kids first year so I still intend to put together 'Baby Books' for them. Other ideas I have include: Christmas Album (showing each Christmas), Vacation album (showing each vacation as a 2-page spread) and Through the years Album (showing 1st Grade, 2nd Grade etc) for each child to summarize their school years.

For journaling I use my calendar and try to summarize the important events of each month. In the past, I just kept the journaling notes in word documents, but now I'm using 'Google Keep' to document my journaling notes. It's great because I can access it from my phone or computer and even 'dictate' the notes using my phone. After each vacation, I like to document 'Top 10 things' or 'Top 10 memories' or even keep a small diary of our itinerary. Keeping the journaling notes will help me when I try to go back in time and scrap the events.

I love reading about this topic and I'm always trying to improve my process!
Karen

I'm behind as well with pages but not that far behind. Maybe 3-4 years? I thought of pocket scrapping but I love dressing up my pages with clusters. I've even considered using quickpages but I can't. I have to put my own flair on my pages. smiley

Ophie, I understand about adding your own touch to Qps! & its possible too, I always try to add my own input wheneer I can, unless I feel its going to spoil the whole thing! It'll usually be a peice of jewellery or a gem, or something that will not deter from the design... smiley

I like to buy template kits that have a cohesive feel to create a quick set of pages - like for when we go on a trip and I have lots of photos and want to get them done in a timely manner. I like the ideas that others are sharing here too.

I am behind as well. I love to use multiphoto templates for my layouts, even the pocket style ones smiley

I think I've been behind since the day I started scrapping! I really like the pocket pages, actually. I started mostly doing those instead of traditional layouts a few years ago, and it really did speed up the process for paper scrapping. The hardest/most time consuming part for me was deciding what sizes to get my photos printed in. I had to spend a lot of time sketching layouts and uploading to different albums on my favorite photo printing site to keep the sizes straight for ordering. But I like the look of them, and I'm really hoping I can figure out how to get that look on the digital pages sometime. (That, and finish up the pages I already printed the individual photos for.)

Has it really been two months already? Well, a little update is in order...

  • My external hard drive is organized & labeled- a little bit more.

  • I've copied pictures back onto the my laptop, in a temporary scrapping folder. I recently saved them all to my external and deleted the files on the laptop.

  • I have some pocket pages setup to use. I still need to figure out if I'm going to use kits, individual pieces or go "basic" with just the color bucket. Very old school. lol.

  • I have 50 layouts (so far) that I'd like to make, from the last thirteen years. Some will be redo's.

  • I plan to do at least, one old layout and one new layout per month. Maybe more (old), if I have time.

  • The photos I use, will be printed in 4x6 format and added to a physical photo album.

  • I hope to have everything caught up by this time, next year. But I won't hold my breath... lol

Bina, I love the idea of the 5 minute time deadline. I will try to aim for 10 or 15 minute pages. I like to sketch my designs/materials and organize everything in a folder, so it's ready to go digitally. Thank you, for the links, I'll be sure to check them out. Quick pages might work really well!

Karen, it's definitely a challenge trying to go through all your photos and so time consuming. I spent a whole day, going through mine and transferring them to my external hard drive. I saved half my photos off Amazon Prime, as well. I think I have one year of photos, left to transfer. As for tagging photos, I'm just clueless. I'd probably spend too much time finding keywords to use. lol. It may work better for you!

I love the idea of your theme albums. With my stepsons, I always thought of layouts and assumed I'd print them off and place them in an album, for each of them to have, by the time they turned 18. They're 17 and 19 now, so I've nixed that idea. But, I could definitely make them for myself. Do you keep all your vacations in one album or only one? I guess one makes sense, you can add pictures and souvenir memorabilia. Then there's no rush to cram everything into one 12x12 page and be done. A Christmas album would be great... there's always so many photos and I never care to scrap those pages. I like the random stuff, like "Day at the Zoo", "Getting lost on the Metro", etc. I think I need to start thinking outside of the box, more like inside the box, and do themes too. I really need to do the school years. My little guy is four and just started preschool. I've been scanning this artwork, he brings home. From experience, I know I can't save all the pieces.

Saving journaling ahead of time, helps too. I've done that. Memories seem to fade away and those funny sayings, get harder to remember as time passes. I tend to save them on paper and shove them in a "scrap" folder, but I think a journal would work better. That way if I never get to make the page, at least it has been recorded in a journal. Plus, that'll keep me writing in a journal, longer than I normally would. Thanks!

Ophie, I do like the thought of clusters, both photo clusters and the ones with all the embellishments attached. They help fill a page quicker than piecing everything yourself. Not that you couldn't build your own (day one) and add photos (day two), before journaling (day three). I've considered working in stages. I always feel like I have to sit from start to finish. My husband says I analyze everything too much, and work less. It's true.

Tiffany, can you recommend some kits? I'd love to have some nice neutral kits, that could go with travel or heritage pages.

Becky, I plan to upload my photos to a printing site and then purchase them every 6-12 mos, to place in physical albums. I may even make some digital albums, I'm not really sure yet. I thought of making a digital baby book, he's four now! Now I'll need to do a baby book and school years.

Dagi, there's so many things I should be doing. I don't feel like I craft enough. It's usually when something comes up, but I'd really like to keep it going and plan ahead. For instance, Halloween is coming up... and what have I considered for it... nothing. And why not? I could be making a nice digital photo mat to print, that says "Halloween 2018". Or planning ahead for Christmas. I also have a graduation party to start brainstorming... it's time for me, to get the creative gears moving.

Lisa, I used to make traditional scrapbook pages and then quickly jumped into the digital world around 2005. I even love the though of hybrids and I'm always tempted to buy the cute dimensional stickers and either place them or scan them to my pages. But by the time I finish the page, I've forgotten all about the stickers. I went to the craft store recently, and now that I get some free time (preschool began for my son), I may just make my visits more frequent. I also plan to print photos into a physical album, so I may see if they have stuff for that.

Chitra, I've done that with jewels, brads and buttons. I've even added more photo mats and extracted pieces of the QP to be able to "tuck" a journaling card or date tag, underneath.

Thanks for this very interesting conversation! And thanks, Katherine, for coming back to give an update, I look forward to hearing more as you continue.

One of the things you mentioned caught my attention as it's something I recently got a new perspective on. You were talking about how your stepsons aren't that interested in your documenting and so you may have to shift to making albums more aimed at yourself as the target audience. I am taking a photography class with Becky Higgins and she had us read an article, 6 Reasons Why Photography Matters. After reading it I had a realization and wrote this to share with the class:

Quote:
A quote from the article: “The significance [of photographs], however, may be for others who search for the person we once were or the places we once knew.” My partner’s kids are growing up in the digital age with a million photos taken of them, shared on social media, etc. So my documenting can feel sort of irrelevant as far as legacy goes. But this article made me realize that by the act of printing out my photobooks with photos and stories, I may actually be creating the real legacy. I can’t imagine their children’s children somehow managing to scroll through great-grandpa’s ancient Facebook photos. Even if my partner’s kids are currently sort of blasé about my scrapbooking, it makes me want to focus more on them and their stories in my printed books because I believe those will endure and be more likely to land in the hands of generations to come.

I know I'm fascinated by every photo and story I have about my parents and grandparents, especially from when they were kids and teens and young adults. And while my kids (who are 14) are the most documented generation ever to exist, I really don't think most of those photos will endure in a format that future generations will access easily - they'll languish on hard drives and in digital albums on extinct social media sites. The albums I make may actually end up defining what the stories and photos are that get passed down.

Anyways, just wanted to share that, it was a profound shift for me and really reoriented how I think about who I am preserving these stories for.

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