Digital Scrapbooking Now

A fun online scrapbook and photo book making site is Picaboo. Just upload your digital photos and make your custom photo book. Choose from a variety of beautiful binders and they have lay flat albums that are neat and slim. You can completely customize your book with a few clicks.

This is a great service for anyone who isn’t technical – no hard-to-understand software. No tutorials to study. Just go to the site and use their help and tools. Use custom backgrounds from your own digital images or select pre-loaded backgrounds for your pages. There is even a background community – other people’s images are available for you to use!

You can customize your book further by adding comments, names, years and journaling with text boxes. There are layouts for you to use as a guide to make your scrapbook or digital photo book look like a professional created it. If you need a gift idea, check out the book ideas, for help with topical or themed scrapbook and greeting cards for weddings, babies, pets, graduation, travel, Mother’s Day, vacations, holidays, Christmas, Easter, family history, genealogy and more.

Try Picaboo – you can easily see their pricing – which is very reasonable for the quality and speed of creation of your custom books.

A question that comes up a lot is this: “Now that i have made a digital scrapbook, how do I print it and put it in a binder?”

That is a really good question! Of course there is no ONE correct answer – which is what I love about creativity! Many people buy their scrapbook album or binder before they design their pages. It gets kind of tricky if you are using a 12 x 12 album because not many home ink jet printers will print paper that large. If you have a printer that prints 11 x 17 (or tabloid size) you can print on that size paper and crop down the pages to 11 x 11 or 11 x 12 to insert into a 12 x 12 binder. (In europe, the closest paper size is A3 which is 11.69 x 16.54 inches.)

If you don’t have a printer with the larger sized paper capapbilities, you can go to a print shop or Kinkos and get your pages printed on 11 x 17 paper. (You’ll still have to crop the pages down because there will be extra white areas on the page.)

If you are lucky enough to have a photo printer that prints 13″ x 19″ photo enlargements, you would get some good results for digital layouts. (The photo printers that print that size are: Epson Stylus Photo 1400 or Epson Stylus Photo R1900, HP Photo Smart, Canon PIXMA Pro9000 and PIXMA Pro9500 (and probably some others).

Many scrapbookers design their layouts for 8.5 x 11 pages (or “letter” size in the U.S.) which are comparable to A4 paper in europe (which measures 8.27 x 11.69 inches). I can’t even imagine what european scrapbookers do to get pages to fit 8.5 x 11 albums! I’ve read that many people print to this size love the borderless printers which allow your print area to go to the edge of the paper (so you don’t have to trim off excess paper after printing).

Of course, if you are making layouts for a smaller album, say at 8 x 8 inches, any printer will be able to output pages that allow for that size, but cropping the final pages will be necessary. Tip: if you DO have 11 x 17 or 13 x 19 printing capabilities, you can “gang up” two 8 x 8 pages and print them on one page, then cut them apart.

So there are some ideas for printing your digital scrapbooks. Maybe you got a new printer and can test it out soon!

Oh yeah, it’s 2009, can you believe it!  Happy New Year scrappers!!