Are there any Digital scrapbookers here?

I need to get my photo's into a scrapbook, I want to do it digitally, do you have a favorite scrapbooking CD to organize your photo's? I'm looking online for the best one to buy but the more I look the more confused I get! The 2 that I see that might be good are Adobe photoshop Elements or Scrapbook Factory. I think Scrapbook Factory might be the more resonable one to buy. Then I also need to get a new printer / scanner, I'll probably lay one away after Christmas.

I will be watching here for anything I can learn, my picture files are helter-skelter on my hard drive. A couple of years ago, I took a technical school course on handling pictures, and my computer took a crash and I lost tons of older pics, so now I'm afraid to do too much with them, and it takes me forever to find what I want!

Just last night I wanted to reply to countrygardens show us your houses, and I tried to scan some old photos, and they saved in Word, and I couldn't post them, I'm frustrated again. Don't know enough. Legit

I burn the photos that I can't bear to lose onto cds, and have a CD by subject (kids, garden, the dog, Skip, etc) On the hard drive, I have sub-folders under My Pictures by similar categories, and I rename the files so I can tell what's what without opening every one. We had a computer crash here, too. Thankfully, the guy at the computer store was able to go in through dos and get most of the files off it for me. Even with the CD back-ups, I would have lost a lot of pictures.

Stacy

Stacy, good idea, I have a few on CD but I dont have near enough, I like the idea od grouping them into catagories on CD, most of mine are grouped on the hard drive but I'd hate to lose them in the event of a crash.

Legit, I'll be buying some type of pc scrapbooking cd, I'll let ya all know what I think of the one I buy, it wont be untill around the 21st of the month, that's when DH gets paid, that will be our Christmas shopping few days before Christmas, yep - I know, I'm really late but DH is on disability so we have space buying things out quite a bit.

I know I have a lot of work to do here, just gambling that nothing happens before I get it done! When you want to post a pic do you stick in a CD and use that for the file? I started to set up some folders on my hard drive, but did not get too far, I have several thousand photos on it, I need all winter, and without a job!!! LOL Legit

LOL Legit - I save all the photos on the hard drive so I can get at them easily, but I use the cd's to back up the important ones. I don't have the patience to be digging through cd's each time I want to post a photo! I started cleaning them up a little at a time, each time I was in that file. It took me eons, but I eventually got it done. I would go through them in the preview pane, and sort into main categories, then one by one clean up the categories into sub categories. It really helped me to rename the files of the good ones with a subject then date so I could find them easily - ie

KD May 2005 (KD's our dog)
Baptisia Australis June 2004
Skip and Stacy - Fam Reunion Summer 2003

If I had multiple of what would be the same file name (like several pics of the dog) I would just add numbers afterward... KD May 2005 1, KD May 2005 2, KD May 2005 3 and so on

and so on....

Well, I'm online pretty early in the A.M. for me...and I ran across this thread.

momof2d, did you make a decision on the ScrapBook software? I have ScrapBook Factory...I must not have been overly impressed with it because it's sitting on the shelf here above my computer and I don't remember much about it. LOL

I'm one of those people that if I lost my pictures (...and I have had some close calls) I'd feel like I lost my best friend. Like Stacy, I burn CDs quite often to back up my huge collection as it grows.

A long time ago, I started organizing my photos in folders by the year, subfolders for the month. At one time I even had sub-sub folders for the days...lol...but that quickly turned into a monster. (*Very* difficult to find individual photos when I *needed* them!)

Now I use one main folder for the year. (I name it '2005' ) Under that I still use seperate folders for each "month" (those folders are named with the year first...month second (2005-01 through 2005-12). I use the numbers rather than the names of the months because I found out a long time ago that computers don't understand that January comes before April.

I also make folders under the year for special shots that I know I'll want to access more often. I have a folder for my DGD's pics, another one for the "Best Pics", another one for my "Unusual shots" (Like the time the Sandhill Crane family decided to take a walk through my back yard...and the time I actually got to *see* a Piliated Woodpecker).

Since most of my pictures are centered around my gardens and specific flower compositions, my monthly system works very well for me. I don't supposed it would work well if I took a lot of scenery or 'people' shots.

Right now, I'm working with some software that will make slideshows from my digital photos and will burn the results to CD's and/or DVDs with several other options including producing a slideshow for the web and email. I like these programs because I get to be creative with the transitions, backgrounds, and can even put music or voice overs in for background and/or picture descriptions.

After the holidays, I'm hoping to get back to my photo slideshow projects. Maybe I'll even decide that they would make good gifts for next Christmas...maybe. :-)

~julie~

Julie , great idea's! No I have'nt decided yet, they look good on the packaging but you can never tell untill you actually download and use it, DH and I are doing our shopping really late this year, he is on disability and so we are going to have to use his once a month check to buy the rest of our Christmas gifts on the 21st, I think we may buy a combo printer/scanner/digi camera with a cradle in the printer (our Fugi camera is outdated and only 2.0) --- still undecided on that as well, most of the family gifts are already bought --- we have just 'us' left to buy for. You are so organized! Maybe I can make that one of my "new Years resolutions! I have a sister who actually alphabetizes her entire kitchen! She goes crazy when she comes to my kitchen! LOL! The most 'organizing ' I've done to my pics are 3 main folders "Favorite Jalen shots" (my 1st grandson) , "Favorite Garden shots" and a generic "Favorite pics". I was hoping to find a program that involved 'photo manipulation' as well as scrapbook functions, but --- I supposed no company would dumb enough to have 'both' in one package, that way they can sell more. I'll let you know what I find! Jill

Jill...I hope you find *just* what you're looking for. :-)

Photo manipulation software is something else that can be a PITA to purchase *and* to use...if you don't want to stick with the "out of the box" manipulations. I use Paint Shop Pro and have for many years. (Actually, I've used it since it was a completely free download in the early days when the 'Internet' was more 'bulletin boards' than a web. That's a LONG time...hehehe)

You just never know what kind of software you'll be able find out there, so keep looking.

And I sure wish people would get over the idea that I'm "organized". LOL *Nothing* could be farther from the truth. It's just that I'd rather *think* about organizing things I have control over...than clean house. ~grin~ (But *my* underwear drawers are neat! ...I *can* control THAT! hehehe)

Have a good one!

~julie~

You mean there's something strange about alphabetizing the spices in your kitchen?

Other than that, I like to think I live in orderly disarray. I don't find it to be a problem but it sure drives DH nuts. lol

I'll be eager to see what you come up with, Jill.

hey ya Moby, I'm anxious too, I hope I dont buy the 'worst' one! I've kinda looked at an Adobe Photo program but that may be "too" much or too difficult for me to figure out, so I'll probably go to something simple, some of the lesser priced pograms say they at least have red-eye reduction and collage type capabilities (and I dont mean the $5 programs , those usually always are bad) --- we'll see! If we get a new photo printer I'll definetly have to have one with a scanner built in as well --- both DH and I have great old black and whites from our folks that we'd like to put onto scrapbook pages for all of the family. I'm a photo freak when it comes to family photo's!

LOL on the alphebetized kitchen.... my mother is like that. Everything in her house in immaculately organized and clean. The saying here is that her house is so clean you could set your ham sandwich on the floor behind any toilet, pick it back up, and eat with full confidence. I inhertited a lot of traits from her, but unfortunately that wasn't one of them.

I use Corel Photo-Paint, but I have also used Adobe Photo Shop. I like both, but to be honest, Microsoft Photo Editor does a fine job and it's a lot less expensive. I use Corel because that's what I have ahd for years, but if I had to go out an buy something, I would probably buy Adobe. For printing, I still think the prints that you get at the store are better than what you can print from home unless you buy a fairly expensive printer. Once the photos are cleaned up and resized, I burn them to a disk and take them to the store. Most photo centers have an atm-ish machine that you can use to print them yourself (about 30 cents each) or if you want large sizes, they'll print them for you.

umm...I'd have to be a starving dog before I ate a ham sandwich from behind MY toilet.

SS ~ I agree with your opinion on photo printing. That ATM-ish thingie is slick! Took the disc straight from my camera, pop it in the machine, sort through all that you want and it prints a list that you give to the photo guy. I used the one at Walgreens to get prints from a trip I took last Spring ~ I had close to 250 prints and it cost a bit over $70, and that included a couple of enlargements. It only took about 45 minutes.

Jill, are you looking for something other than photo editing, storage and organization? Have you tried Picasa 2?

This message was edited Dec 19, 2005 7:50 AM

Same here - I wouldn't eat a ham sandwich that had even *thought* about the floor behind the my toilet.

Moby I tried Picasa ( as suggested by someone on a DG thread ) but I could'nt get it up and running, I'm not sure why. Hopefully a program or two from Best Buy will give me some good stuff for photo editing and/or digital scrapbooking. I'll check out Microsofts Photo editor as Stacy mentioned -- if I have enough dough to play with this week, we'll see, I'll let ya all know!

Jill

That's a bummer, Jill. The Picasa 2 is a really nice program for being a freebie.