by Lesley Rigg

Created on: September 07, 2009

How you organize your family photos depends very much on what you are trying to achieve. You could catalogue them by date and have them in strict chronological order, but that perhaps wouldn't convey the people in them, or the things they went on to do. More often people choose to create their scrapbooks around an event that is important to them or other people.

There are a myriad of things that you can do with photos these days, and how you organize and display them has infinite possibilities. if you are scrap-booking these items, perhaps one of the nicest things to do would be to organize them around themes. Either to do a book for each book, or each family, or to cover a particular vacation or event would be the best way of people viewing them, which in the end is the purpose for organizing them.

If you are planning to add glue and paper to the photographs, and perhaps cut them to fit the pages, then i would advise that you get good quality prints or copies of scans of your precious photographs, so that the originals still exist should you wish to use them for another purpose.

A note of caution, however, try out your designs on the page before you apply glue or other stick items to the page, you want to make sure that your idea will work, or that the order you have decided on is relevant when you get to the last page as it was on page one.

Sometimes you can make very good use of repeating patterns in scrapbooks, so you could perhaps get good copies of relevant photographs several times and make a fan effect acros the page which can have a lot of dramatic impact, particularly if the event is memorable or particularly dramatic, such as a sporting or event involving movement of some description.

With the onset of photoshop and the effects that it can produce, you can also take digital photographs and give them effects such as pop-art or black and white and change various things about the photograph in order to fit in with the page you have allocated to that shot. You can even match colors of the paper and tissue you may be using to parts of the photograph if they don't quite match. All things are possible with digital photographs, including creating a mosiac effect with one person or element in the photograph repeated again to be placed in a scrapbook.

There are huge amounts of paper craft items that you can add to your photos when scrapbooking and you would be wise to take a look around a number of craft stores and collect items that might be useful over a period of time before sitting down and putting glue to paper, etc. The important thing at the end of the day is that it looks good and is enjoyable to create. Have fun!

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