Digi Scrapping Part 2

It's been almost 4 months since I wrote my first blog article about digi scrapping - you can find it here.

Since that time I've been scrapping like crazy, except of course for the last week. I have been so busy trying to regain control of my house and getting prepared for the coming homeschool year. I'm guess I'm going through a withdrawal, and even now when I could scrap for a little while I'm having a creativity block. It been a whole week, and it's like I've lost my momentum, and I don't know where to start. I knew the time would come that the pace that I had set at almost a page a day for 3 months couldn't last forever. Besides, MaryAnn is to big to nurse while using the computer.

I did get to share my excitement this weekend with my cousin, I thought that since I knew she was good with Photoshop she would have already been into digi scrapping, but it turns out she was a paper scrapper. She is probably hooked now though. I've also addicted my sister to digi scrapping and I've been able to teach her how over the telephone and lots of emails. The digi scrapping thing is spreading, and it is so wonderful.

My Dad sent me an email today - and I thought this quote fit perfectly with the scrapbooking craze.

A Birth Certificate shows that we were born
A Death Certificate shows that we died
Pictures show that we lived!

It just so true, a picture can really make the story come to life. I've been working on my Grandma's life history for years, but since I discovered her photos in June I've really been "on fire" and my love for her and my retention of her stories has increased. Take this picture of her cheerleaders group. Grandma and her friends formed a cheerleader group, just because. Don't they look like they are having so much fun! You tend to forget that your parents and grandparents were young once.

I promised to get back to you on scanning. The best way to scan newer pictures is with a commercial scanner. I looked up lots of places online to mail my pictures off to to have them scanned, and the prices were high, and they wanted to send my precious photos across the ocean to be scanned in India or some other country. However, I was lucky enough to find out that my local Heritage Makers' consultant had access to a comercial scanner. I got about 800 pictures scanned in a weekend, for apx 25 cents a picture. It was wonderful, now I have so many more pictures of my kids in the pre-digital era to scrapbook.

However, when I discovered Grandma and Grandpa's boxes of photos I new that a the speedy commercial scanner wasn't going to work (it works with a sheet feeder). I found this program, VueScan . It has an automatic scan feature that allows you to scan a lot of pictures in a fairly short amount of time, and it automatically saves them to a file. I was putting about 5 -8 pictures on the scanbed at a time and scanning about every 10 seconds and it worked great. I was able to scan the picture in and keep them from deteriorating even further much faster than I will ever be able to process them, identify them, and scrapbook them. I found that it is easier to scan them in and the print them out to take to my Grandparents to identify them. That way they can write on the front of the picture, and I can read off the front of the picture when I process them on the computer. It is easy to get confused, so come up with a system before you get to overwhelmed with photos. If you want more info on my system, just email me throught the contact form.

Once I started getting captions for the photos I had to figure out how to save the caption with the picture, no matter where the picture was or who I emailed it to. I found several great programs, and although Picasa doesn't have all the features, it had a great price, FREE, from Google. Picasa will allow you to edit your photos, to add captions, and to search photos based on the captions, the directory names, and the file name. WOW! Important Note: Add captions, not keywords. If you add captions then email the photo to you family the captions will go with the photo, it is saved as part of the file name. If You use keywords it is only saved in the database on your computer. You can get Picasa here from Google for free.

Picasa has many neat features, it allows you to add photos to your blogger blog, you can create web albums to share with friends and family, you can easily send photos as email, and many more features.

Here's another great page by Nancy!
Till next time - remember, Pictures show that we lived!