Getting organized is important. With digital cameras you can literally have thousands of photos lying around on CDs, memory sticks, in the camera and on various hard drives. Choose your project - what do you want to scrap? Do you want to do a whole year, a set of years or a special trip? Once you’re clear about your topic, you need to gather all of your photos into one place.
There are lots of choices when it comes to photo organization software. I personally use a Mac and iPhoto. I’m not thrilled with it and curse it’s limitations, but I manage to work around those limitations and beat it into submission. I have been toying with Adobe Lightroom. I like it because I can quickly retouch all of my photos and I trust the software to do a good job (I don’t trust the iPhoto editing) and I don’t have to open them all in Photoshop.
Now that you have all of your photos in one place, you can start to whittle away at them. Choose the very best, your favorite, images you really want in your book. You should have a space on your primary hard drive for these photos. Make copies of them and leave the originals where they are. A fresh set, on your working hard drive, now you are ready to go.
Open the folder of photos in Adobe Bridge and manually arrange them in the order you want them to appear in your book. At least clump them together if you don’t know the order. Now your photos are ready to go.
For speed and efficiency, I actually design a bunch of pages first. I choose the kits I want to use and crank out pages using pre-made layout templates, “scrap-lifting” from magazines and websites, etc. I create a nice little cache of layered designs just waiting for me to add my photos. I keep these all in a folder on my working harddrive (and usually inside of a folder that holds this folder and my photos folder for this project).
With my templates and my photos both open in Bridge, I can now choose which photos will go in which page. This process goes fairly quickly. I’ve already completed the design - which was speedy because I wasn’t attached to how it looked. Now I can add my photos and make it mine. Sometimes my design is just perfect and I just drop in the photos and I’m done. Sometimes I alter the design to fit my photos. Either way, my pages take 5-15 minutes each to complete.
I create folders called “used inside” of my pre made design folder and my photos folder. I drag the designs and the photos into those as I use them to make my pages. That way I don’t accidentally use them again.
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