All about digital scrapbooking

The trouble is, many of us have been saying that for years. Though we’d love to print out our favorite photos and paste them into a keepsake album, scrapbooking is time-consuming and messy. (Ever tried vacuuming glitter out of the carpet? Enough said.)

It’s also hard to share your singular creation with friends and family if you can’t see them in person.

That’s where digital scrapbooking comes in.

But what is a digital scrapbook exactly? Digi-scrapping, as it’s called in the scrapper community, is a fun way to organize and showcase precious memories in colorful online albums. Like an analog scrapbook, digital scrapbooks combine imagery and ephemera into a computerized format.

Got two sets of grandparents, nine aunts and uncles, and 20 cousins hounding you for photos from the family reunion? No problem. Digital scrapbooking makes sharing easy, and everybody gets a copy!

Here’s a step-by-step guide that’ll show you how to make a digital scrapbook the simple way:

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1. Pick a subject.

Vacations, birthdays, weddings, honeymoons, baby showers, bar mitzvahs, graduations, retirements, summer camp, a study abroad program—if it’s worth documenting, it’s worth scrapbooking. Folks who are new to the medium should start with a smaller project—something that only requires sifting through a few dozen or hundred photos as opposed to a few thousand. Focus on a recent event (birthday party, vacation, girls’ night out) and you won’t have to go hunting for old pictures.

2. Organize your photos.

Once you’ve decided on the theme of your scrapbook, dig into your archives to pull your favorite images. Luckily, most devices let you search your camera roll by subject to make finding things much easier; same goes for photos and videos you uploaded to the cloud.

Don’t be too picky—the more options you give yourself, the more freedom you’ll have when it’s time to start designing layouts. Images can be safely and easily organized, grouped, labeled, tagged, and stored on the cloud until you’re ready to use them. If you share cloud storage with friends and family, they can upload their own photos for your scrapbooking consideration.

3. Select your software.

Digital scrapbooking can be done on a PC, tablet or phone—you just need the right software. Popular options include Scrapbook & Photo Collage, Memory Mixer, My Memories Suite, PhotoMix, Project Life, Forever Artisan and Smilebox, to name a few. Once you get the hang of the software, your imagination can run wild—altering the colors and tones of images (or airbrushing them to perfection), cutting images into fun shapes like stars, hearts and more.

4. Ease into digital scrapbooking by using templates.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when staring at a blank screen. But you’re in luck: There are also plenty of ready-made digital templates that take the guesswork out of getting started. Simply choose a layout with a design that speaks to you and start clipping your own images and text to its preset layers. Software that includes templates will even have FAQ sections will walk users through trickier tasks like red eye correction, but most templates are straightforward and user-friendly. Depending on your subject matter or the scrapbook’s intended audience, you might choose a more elegant or minimalist template. This works especially well for wedding and newborn albums, whereas a louder, more playful template may be more suitable for a kid’s birthday party or first Halloween.

5. Show some personality.

Once you’re comfortable using scrapbooking templates or software, try weaving in more personal touches. Patterned backgrounds, festive badges and stamps, decorative ribbons and bows, emoji-like illustrations, alphabet blocks and typewriter keys, unique frames, drop shadows, transparent overlays, hand-drawn doodles, and other digital flourishes make your vision come alive. Some multimedia software even lets you incorporate videos and music into your scrapbook layouts. It’s these little touches that make your creation sing.

6. Share your masterpiece.

You’ve poured your heart and soul into making a fabulous digital scrapbook. Now it’s time to share it. Scrapbooking software lets you distribute copies via email or upload your creation to your social media network or cloud-based server.

And hey, if you’re an old-school crafter who still loves the feel of real paper and glue-covered fingers, you can always combine digital scrapbooking with its analog cousin by designing your layouts online, printing them out and pasting them into a physical album. Glitter-up the pages to your heart’s content, press washi tape around the edges to create a vivid border, or glue a paper flower over a printed bloom to add real dimension. It’s the best of both worlds.