Digitizing Scrapbooks

Once upon a time, I spent my free time scrapbooking. I bought papers and stickers and took pictures with film and printed them at Costco. My dad had a digital camera. He took a picture of our first born son and it was the first one I had, cause he was able to print it from home with his color printer. I thought it was a precious picture. And I had just the paper to put it on. And thus was scrapbooked the first photo I ever scrapbooked~ Little Baby Joseph just one week old.

I was a serious scrapbooker for a solid 5 years, or atleast feigned to be - having lots of cardstock and stickers and markers and an area where I did my work. I did baby's first birthdays and eventually got to our wedding photos and a little of college. Then I tried to keep up with scrapbooking life as each kid joined our life. I started to fall behind when Corey started his MBA and money was tight and space more limited in our student housing apartment. Then Wesley came along which continued the time crunch, then we moved to DC... I was still taking lots of photos but wasn't able to keep up with the scrapbooking workload. Then moved to Brazil, and there it officially stopped. I stopped printing pictures in 2007 cause I already had like 6 photo albums to do... no need to print more until I'm starting to make a dent in those. But I began to blog a little, then blogged as my official hobby when we went to Costa Rica. That was when my scrapbooking went the way of all the earth.

So I've got a good fifteen 3-ring binders of scrapbooked pages in their sheet protectors. What to do with them. Well, I've been thinking when the kids are on their missions, I plan on keeping their emails and photos copied and pasted right away over to a blog that I can print up for them. Hmm, maybe it would be good to get started on that, but how? Well, on Sunday, my friend Kathy O. from our church ward told me about how she just learned at Roots Tech how to scan and organize photos. Then she came over yesterday to show me how with my phone and so I've started! I've scanned the scrapbook pages with the PhotoScan App and then will figure out how to organize them in Google Photos, where you can organize by person, place, by event and such.

I'm still toying with it, and depending on the picture I think just taking a photo might work better than the photo scan sometimes but we'll see if I'm able to do this. I've got enough work that I could be busy for the next 100 years. If only I didn't have to raise a family or sleep or do dishes, but then I guess I wouldn't be enjoying or creating all these events to be documented. I'll try to enjoy the now and I know that someday if I ever do send my last off to kindergarten or if I ever am an empty nester, I've got lots of projects to keep me busy. It will be fun to do, whenever I get to it!