Erik Birkeland asked:




Scrapbooking is a great hobby and art form. Preserving your family memories and histories is an excellent thing to do for yourself and for your family. Traditionally people go to their local craft store purchase a scrapbook and the materials that go with it. This entails using a lot of room at their home and a small mess with clippings and glue. With the advent of the Internet this scenario has changed. Now there is a vast amount of information online that allow for digital scrapbooking. With the Internet you will not have to deal with all the clippings and glue.

Now with doing things on a computer you will have some distinct advantages over traditional scrap booking. Keep in mind that you will be giving up some things also. But we’ll talk about that later. With the computer you will be able to regenerate a photo an endless amount of times. If you happen to mess one up while you are working on your scrapbook then it isn’t that big of a deal. You will also have many different fonts and labels. Most of these will be for free. You see avid scrapbookers are more than willing to help you out for free.

Another great advantage to digital scrap booking is that getting the scrapbook out to your loved ones is much easier than with a traditional scrapbook. With a traditional scrapbook you would either have to take the scrapbook around, ship it around or make multiple copies of it. Not that easy of a thing to do. With digital scrap booking you can email it, post it to a family website or burn a CD and send it in the mail. How much easier is that not to mention less expensive?

Another tremendous advantage is all the effects you can do to your scrapbook at the click of a button. You can easily color your letters. You can apply various effects to your pictures to make them standout. You can remove the red dots in people’s eyes that seem to always happen when you take their picture. You can digitize your own handwriting. If it is a Christmas album you can make it snow. In one of my last albums I had specific songs playing for each different page. The effect was very powerful and got exactly what I was feeling across to my family. The options are almost endless.

You will need a few items to be able to do scrap booking. The first is a computer, of course, not an issue since you have to have one if you are reading this. The next is quality scanner. You will need this to get actual pictures into you computer. You should also invest in a decent digital camera. Pay special attention to the software that comes with the camera. These packages are normally quite good and will definitely enhance the pictures in your albums. If you don’t want to buy a digital camera then don’t worry there are a number of free packages available online.

Make sure you don’t pass up this great new trend in scrapbooking. Now earlier I mentioned that there are some downsides to digital scrap booking. Digital scrapbooking, like all things on computers, can be a little on the non-personal side. Traditional scrapbooking is great because you share the creation of the albums with your loved ones. You can spend an afternoon putting one together with your kids and reminiscing with them about the pictures of your family. This is quite powerful. There are also scrapbooking clubs so you can socialize while doing your hobby. Interaction with other people is important and I think gets lost in these days of computers. Ultimately I expect you will find that blending digital scrapbooking with traditional scrapbooking is the best way to go. Each have their strengths and put together they benefit greatly.

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