Using OPs for collections

We all tend to go a little crazy with digital cameras and take heaps of shots of one thing, usually one of the grandkids doing something cute in my case. After you’ve used the best one or two pics in a great digi-scrapped page you need something to do with the rest to put in your album. After all, they are part of the story.

That’s where the OPs come in really handy.



Here’s a 12x12 template for an OP (other page) that uses up lots of images and also showcases a couple of the best. The example is a page I’ve made for MiL’s memory book.

A fun way to use this approach is to do a strip of facial expressions. The grandies are really great for this.

Here’s the 12x12 template for you to download. I’ve also done one for A4 but that will have to wait for another day.

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Some of my favourite software tools

Here are some of the software tools that I use when making digital photo albums and pages:

• Photoshop Elements - for image editing and page construction. Also used to create additional elements to embellish pages. Has a learning curve but there is lots of support and tutorials around to help out.
• PowerPoint - seriously, I use this when I am making up very quick pages for the home albums. It has some useful graphic capabilities that are well worth learning
• SnagIt - screen capture program that is getting more and more featured with each new version. It has a good editor and lots of features for enhancing images. I use it a lot when creating instructions and tutorials
• ACDSee - image organiser

None of these are free but all have been well worth the price paid.

Other Pages - OPs

What a difference a day makes. One day I am happily preparing A4 album pages of our south west trip to be printed off at home and the next I am preparing 12in x 12in pages for a commercially printed photo book for my DMiL for Mothers Day.

Can't blame anyone but myself unfortunately. DMiL had handed over packets of dusty negatives and DFiL's very dusty 35mm slide collection for me scan and when they were done, it just seemed like a great idea to turn them into something she really would look at, show to others and enjoy old memories. DH really liked the idea of a hard cover book and he chose the 12x12 format. What's a girl to do!

So now I am planning the book. It will have some lovely digital scrapbooked pages (DSPs) for the most important photos and then there will be lots and lots of other pages that are full of images but low on frills. These other pages (OPs) will still have a nice background and a little bit of embellishment to carry the theme but they are really photo album pages.

I've started to create templates for the 12x12 OPs so that I can put them together quickly. Here's one that is ready to go and I will share some more as time goes along.

These templates differ from the ones I'm doing for my home printed A4 pages in that these leave a half inch between the edge of the paper and the images. This stops images from falling into the deep middle of the book and spoiling the look of pages. In the A4 templates, I have them hard up against the edge as when they are printed, they will go into sleeves so I don't have to worry about them disappearing into the middle.

I will still work on the trip book as well so more A4 templates will also appear from time to time.

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Arrangement template

If you are doing a set of pages that have lots of images, all of which you want to use, it is handy to have some templates so you can quickly crop images to the right size and then place them on the page. These templates are great for those pages at the back of wedding albums where you want to include at least one photo of everyone from Great Aunt Maud to your grotty cousin Egbert. I also find them very useful for travel pages where the image is the thing and the text is less important.

Here's one A4 template along with an example of it in use for a travel album. The sizes are for a tight fit into the corners and edges of an A4 page and there is a 1cm gap between images. Click on an image for a larger view.
I'll be adding more templates as we go along if you find them useful.

A What?

A4 that's what.

This is the size I use as default for my digital photo albums. I can easily get paper of all weights in this size and it fits into readily available plastic sleeve albums.

The actual size of an A4 page is well worth knowing as you will need this when you set up your page software. The official size for A4 is 210mm x 297mm.

The size is set according to the International Standards Organisation standard known as ISO216 which covers all the A, B and C sizes. You can find a full explanation of these along with some useful tables and some wonderfully interesting looking mathematical formulae, which I will ignore, on Wikipedia .