I know, some of you are thinking, "Well, duh!" You have always planned your pages before ordering/printing pictures. You are so smart! It only took me 7 years of scrapbooking to figure this out! I used to just print everything. And I take a lot of photos. I would take 50+ pictures at one little event (like going to the fair, or digging the garden. Not kidding.) and print them all. So after struggling to fit as many as possible onto one layout, the rest would be snuggled into photo boxes, of which I have many. I am slowly being overrun by photo boxes. When I returned from New Zealand and realized that I had thousands of photos, I knew I had to change the way I do things. If I printed all of those pictures, not only would I have no room in my craft lair, but I would also have no money left in my bank account. Something was going to have to give.
My answer? Sketching. (This is actually tip #2.) I decided on my page topic, looked at the photos from that topic, narrowed down my choices, and then picked the number of photos I needed to print. Instead of printing 35 photos from Christchurch, I printed 12.
This is a shot from my sketchbook. I draw the layout, include the photo sizes, and indicate where the title and journaling will go. Do I always follow the sketch exactly? No, but it helps me with my photo choices and sizes.
This leads to tip #3: Resize and crop your photos in a photo-editing software (like Photoshop) before you print.
I have always had a big problem cropping my paper photos. As my photography has improved through the years, I just don't have a lot of croppable space on my pictures. I tend to fill the frame with my subject and choose the backgrounds carefully, knowing I will be scrapping these pictures. Without significant cropping, however, it's very difficult to get a lot of pictures on the page. So I solve this by cropping and resizing on the computer.
If you have a sketch of your planned page, you easily know what sizes you need. In the above photo, you see the sketch in the bottom right corner. It calls for a vertical 5×7 and three horizontal 4x3s. I will crop my photos to 4×3, or I'll just resize the whole photo as it is, then I will put two 4x3s on the same 4×6 canvas. Two for the price of one! You can fit 6 2×2 squares on a 4×6. I love that. I've saved so much money by being discriminating with my printing that I can afford to have focal point photos enlarged. And then, when the photos arrive from whatever printing service I've used (I tend to use www.snapfish.com sometimes, but mostly I use www.scrapbookpictures.com ), I know exactly how I'm going to use them. Scrapbooking has become a much faster hobby for me, and I can spend more time playing with paper, embellishments, and journaling, because I already know what my layout will be and what pictures I'm using.
First Three Tips:
1. Plan the page before you print the photos
2. Use sketches to plan
3. Crop and resize on the computer before you print
I’m thinking of doing a couple of albums in the near future! I make such a mess of my house doing this, but I DO like the finished projects!