Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another edition of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today, I am going to share a few very simple (yet quite useful!) tips for fitting multiple photos onto a layout.

If you’re like me, one of the most difficult parts of scrapbooking is choosing photos with which to scrap. I suffer from ‘separation’ and ‘abandonment’ anxiety when it comes to discarding some of the photos that don’t make the ‘cut’. 🙂

Whilst good selection may be essential for effective storytelling, I often find that I am trying to fit more photos onto my pages — especially when there is a back-story to those photos. Therefore, I went back through my gallery to see how I’ve solved this issue in the past, and to compile a list of some useful tips and tricks I could share with you. And believe it or not, I found there actually is a method to my madness, when I scrap! LOL

So without further ado… the following are my thoughts on “how to work multiple photos into your layouts”…

1. Make pocket pages

The first obvious approach is to make a pocket style page. The beauty of this scrapping style is that the canvas is neatly divided into spots that you can then fill with your photos, journaling, papers, embellishments or a combination of all of these. Here is an example from one of my favourite pages.

Credits:Beats Journalers by Creashens, Template is Duo 10 Go anywhere by LBVD Designs, Blue skies ahead alpha and papers by River Rose Designs

There is also an awesome tutorial about pocket scrapping and how to go about it if you are new to it :).

In this final example I have literally added more photo spots. Simple and effective 🙂 Varying the photos between black and white and colour also adds a great deal of interest to the page.

In the following examples, I have simply used different crops of similar shots – some in colour and some in black and white. I also used full length big photo on the left hand side.

 Credits: Hello February by Dunia Designs, Choices template by Meg Designs

 Credits: Documented papers and templates by Anita Designs, Love is in the air elements by Mommyish and Mari K

 

If you look at the following layout and the template I have used as a starter, it is only but a small proportion of my overall design. In other words the template is hardly recognisable but I still had a great start using it and take it further from there.

So that’s it! …seven (7) easy ways to approach scrapping when you have lots of photos you need to include on a single page. I hope you find these ideas to be useful! Meanwhile, if you have ideas of your own for solving the “fitting multiple photos onto one layout” issue… I would love to see your own hacks! I’m always looking for more ideas. Please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Until next time… stay creative! Ciao!

About the Author Shivani Sohal is a donner of many alter-egos. A finance professional by day in busy London, she morphs into a seemingly normal mum of two in the evenings and weekends. She is constantly found with her fingers in too many pies and juggling the metaphorical balls. That is living on the edge for her; aided by the two ankle biters and a darling hubby who define the warm and mushy for her. She is ferociously dedicated to memory keeping — almost immune to any nay-sayers (or equally-disruptive crying children or annoying house fires!); keeping her head down and forging ahead at all times.

I love using Lightroom. When I first began using it, it was solely for the purpose of photo editing; I do almost all of my photo editing in Lightroom. After playing around in the program for a while, though, I started using it for keywording (a.k.a. tagging) my photos for organizational purposes — and eventually I also began using it to tag my digital scrapbooking supplies. The more I use Lightroom, the more I love it. Keywording in Lightroom is quick and easy… and helpful! …and that’s what I am here to share with you today.

For a long time, I did all of my keywording simply by typing in the keywords I wanted to use (saving to the file’s metadata)… and/or by clicking on the keywords that showed up in the “Recent Keywords” set. One day, however, for whatever reason… I noticed there were up and down arrows immediately to right of the “Recent Keywords” set. Hmmm. Why had I never noticed that before? Nested under “Recent Keywords” was a option to save and edit a keyword set. Finding that option was a great time-saver for me. Keywording is definitely not one of my favorite tasks, but I consider it a necessary part of my scrapbooking/photo-editing process and I welcome any and all shortcuts I find to speed up the process. I bet you will too!

So, before I show you how to create a keyword set, in case you haven’t been using Lightroom for keywording I first want to give you a quick how-to for basic keywording:

• When you’re in the Library Panel press CMD/CTRL+K to access the Keywording Panel.
• From there you just type in the keywords you want added to the metadata of your photo. *NOTE* You can add multiple keywords to a photo, simply by separating the keywords with a comma. For my example, I used the keywords “Barbara, BAU, Grant, Lauren, Scott, Stonehenge, UK” because these are the words I will most likely use to search for this photo at some point.

As I mentioned above, I find that creating Keyword Sets is a big timesaver. I’ve got a couple of standard keyword sets that I use. Some standard sets I find useful are for different sets of family members. I like to tag all the individual family members in my photos so I can quickly access photos of individual people. Yes, that is very detailed and perhaps more detailed than some people would want to go with their keywording… but the process actually goes quickly, and it saves me so much time down the road when I’m looking for photos.

I have three basic sets that I use all the time:

1. “Us At Home” is a set of keywords I use all the time for my core family (my husband, kids, dog and at home keywords)
2. “May Family” is a set of keywords of the names of people on my side of the family.
3. “Unzen Family” is a set of keywords of the names of people on my husband’s side of the family.

From there, I’ll create keyword sets for individual holidays and events, vacations, etc. — any keywords that I feel I’ll use over and over for a particular set of photos. I’ll save these keywords to a temporary (or permanent) keyword set. It saves me time and speeds up my keywording process.

So, now you probably want to know how to create a Keyword Set. This is the very simple process:

• Click on the little up/down arrows to the right of “Recent Keywords”
• Click on “Edit Set”
• Type in the keywords you want included in the set (each set can hold 9 keywords). Hit Tab to move from box to box.
• When you’ve entered in the 9 keywords you want included in the set click on the down arrow next to Preset and choose “Save Current Settings as New Preset”
• Type in a name for your preset

That’s it! So easy, right?

And the benefit is that after doing this, when you’re keywording images at a later point in time you can choose between using your “Recent Keywords” and any of the other Keyword Sets you’ve created. Such a time-saver! Give it a try. I hope you find that creating and using Keyword Sets in Lightroom speeds up your keywording/tagging process, as well.

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments of this post and I’ll get back to you. Also … if you’ve got any Lightroom shortcuts of your own that you’d like to share with us, feel free to share them with us in the comments, as well!

About the Author:  Barbara Unzen is a member of the creative team here at The Digital Press. She’s a mom to two teenage kids, a 19 year old son and a 17 year old daughter. In her free time she loves to digi scrap, take photos and hang out with her family.

Welcome to another installment of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today, I am here to advocate for a simple technique that will help you create more scrapbook pages (and faster, and more easily!) — scraplifting yourself.

I would like to use this post to encourage you to be gentle on yourself and not feel as though every layout you create has to be a masterpiece… while also helping you to avoid feeling as though creating layouts leaves you feeling drained. It’s a hobby and it should be fun, right?

Let’s be honest… life is busy, and there are so many things that have to be done all the time. Often we find that by the time we sit down at the computer to take advantage of a few moments of crafty “me time,” our creative energy seems to have dissipated.

How to solve this?

You can always turn to your tried-and-true sources for inspiration. I love The Digital Press Gallery; Pinterest is another fun source of ideas (as is Instagram, as people are posting their scrapbooking creations there more and more often all the time nowadays!). Sometimes, though, I find that I use up all of my scrapping time just looking at other people’s layouts without doing anything with my own photos and getting any of my stories told. Oops! This ends up leaving me feeling despondent and uncreative.

An easy fix for me is to choose the photos I want to scrapbook, and then look at my own arsenal of previous layouts… with the goal being to re-create one that uses the same number of photos, along w/ a new/different kit or collection. I just clip (Ctrl-G) the new papers and photos over the existing ones, and swap out the embellishments with new items from the kit I am working with the second time around.

For example, let’s take this layout that I created for TDP’s 3-for-3 challenge in March 2017…

Characteristics of This Layout:

• 3 photos
• 3 different patterned papers
• visual triangle of clusters
• engaging title
• complimentary colours of red and blue
• right-aligned journaling

I still love this layout, and so for the next layout I had just 30 minutes to create and I started with 3 photos of my grandnieces playing outside of the holiday house we shared in December.

I kept the placement of just about everything exactly the same –the photos, papers and journaling — and I changed up the date, etc. Instead of creating a new title, I used a pre-designed piece of word art from the newest TDP Designer Collaboration “Fresh Air“. I still have foundation layers of paint and a scatter. Three points of orange, with a fourth embellishment spot that is tone-on-tone blue to break boundaries and add a different shaped element for interest. I added shadows as I went along… and in 30 minutes, it was finished and ready to be printed!

Here’s a look…

Again, Characteristics of This Layout:

• 3 photos
• 3 patterned papers
• visual triangle of orange
• wordart title
• complimentary colours of blue and orange
• centered journaling

I decided to use this page’s composition one more time. For this last layout, we had a family BBQ on the day before we left Johannesburg and I wanted to highlight the men’s role in cooking and that the women had a relaxed off duty kind of day. 🙂

For this newest page, I wanted to include a 4th photo of my hubby grilling the meat… so I nudged the photos to the right and squeezed him in there. You can see more similarities with the second layout than the first, including white piece of word art layered over the photo, and centered journaling. Of course, these layouts look strikingly similar — but you could also mix things up by turning the design 90 degrees, or by flipping the paper layers found at the top to the bottom of the page, instead (or changing up the font, etc.). I went for speed over creativity, though, and as these layouts will be separated within the family album of 2016 with different opposing layouts I can almost bet that no one will even notice that they’re almost the same…

Characteristics of This Third Layout:

• 4 photos
• 3 patterned papers
• diagonal/asymmetrical points of pink
• Blue, green and pink
• wordart title and sub-titles
• centered journaling

What do you think? Do you have 30 minutes to spare, in which you want to complete a brand-new layout in just that short time? This technique will help you do so! Just turn to a tried-and-true layout design that you already love… open that PSD or TIF file… remove the papers and embellishments… and start again!

If you give this a try, I’d love to see your results! Feel free to load your layouts to The Digital Press Gallery, and you can even link us up to the original layout in your credits/description if you want to.

 About the Author  Stefanie is a member of the creative team here at The Digital Press Co. She is a mom of three older children, all living in Cape Town, South Africa, with her hubby of 29 years and their two cats. In her free time she loves digital scrapbooking, dabbling in photography and reading.