It is still Saturday in the US and some other countries right? 😉
So instead of speedwriting to make it before Saturday 11:59 PM Manila time last night, I slept. So here I am with a late SS post, and not even the third installment to my Organization series that I thought I’d be writing. Nonetheless, I have something even better! I have a new layout for the mini-album! Take a lookie:
All the photos were taken by my god-daughter Iskra, Chelle’s daughter, the same one with her tongue and kilikili exposed in a previous SS layout :).
I can’t wait to finish this project and start scrapping our vacation photos.
Last week, we talked about organizing our photo stash. Today, I’d like to share one way for organizing your digital scrapbooking stash.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t anything new, and I’m even positive that I got the idea from a Scrap Girls tutorial for beginning digiscrappers. But since this was the first method I used to organize my stash, I’d like to share it with everyone tonight. 🙂
There are two key assumptions to this method though:
The designers name and package their files/kits with a certain way that includes the designer name/initials, and the kit name.
That you organize your stash as soon as you download and unzip.
Now, because not all kits I downloaded conformed to assumption #1, and I didn’t always unzip the same day I download, I admit that this method proved to be quite tedious and took away from actual scrapping time.
Despite that, I still believe that it could be a great way to organize stuff. In fact, when I got down to do some actual scrapping, it was actually not that difficult to shop around my own stash and find things that would go well with my layout.
So what to do?
Set up your folder structure. Yes. This means that you need to prepare the folders in your hard drive in which you’ll be dumping stuff after you unzip. I’ve got a sample here:
I created a new folder inside My Documents, and labeled it SCRAP. Of course you can create your own folder elsewhere in your hard drive if you want. My real stash is actually in a secondary HD, and the folder name is Digi Scrap Store (because I think of my shop as a big store!).
Inside the SCRAP folder, I created FIVE basic subfolders that you can see in the screen shot: BACKGROUNDS – or Papers, ELEMENTS, FRAMES, PREVIEWS, and TOUs (Terms of Use).
The next level of folders is where the fun begins. You can have as many sub-folders that you can think of within the five basic ones mentioned above.
For BACKGROUNDS, you may have subfolders per COLOR or HUE. At home, I have a PINK-RED, BLUE-VIOLET, EARTH-BROWN, GREEN, YELLOW-ORANGE subfolders. I did have a separate folder for THEMED PAPERS though. That’s where papers for specific occasions would go (halloween, Christmas, etc.).
The same subfolders of color and hue follow for my ELEMENTS folder. Within each folder for a color, would be even more subfolders for the many types of elements/embellishments that exist! For example:
 Coming up with categories for your elements can be fun, but also sometimes confusing. Haha. Aside from these three, I have GLITTER, DOODLES, JOURNALLING MATS, and many others I can’t particularly remember right now!
With this particular method, it is quite easy to find papers and elements that would match the colors of the photos you are scrapping.
One thing that was a challenge though, is the fact that, going back to assumption #1, not all designers would put their name and the kit name in the file name for each paper and element in the pack. So, after unzipping, you would need to find time to rename everything to include the information. Of course, when I started organizing stuff, I wasn’t very diligent yet. So what happened was, I would use a paper or an element, and have a tough time identifying who made it or from what site/kit I took it from.
Next week, I’ll share another organization tip with you all.
I used papers and elements from Vicki’s new kit, Blue Jeans. Check it out on her blog, here. The alpha I used for the title is a favorite, also by Vicki, but this time from her Cherry Cheesecake Kit.
The journalling at the top is something I made using freebie Glitter styles by Flergs. Wow me. Haha 🙂
My PSP crashed just when I was adding the title (beads) and journalling to this page. The catch is, I hadn’t saved my work! So I started again from scratch but because I knew what I used and how I used them, the second time around was faster to make 🙂
By the way, I resized all of the stuff I used here because this page will go into my mini-album too.
In nearly all digiscrapping sites and forums, you will find talk about organizing the digi-stash. With designers coming out with multiple new kits every couple of days, and freebies galore, the newbie digiscrapper easily finds herself not only out of hard drive space, but also at a loss as to which paper or element to use first!
If you’re just starting out with this hobby, then there’s no better time to start organizing your stash than now. Take it from me, I must have been in acquiring and organizing mode for a long time it actually took up the time I could have spent on actual scrapbooking.
For this edition of Scrapbook Saturday, I’d like to talk about Organizing our Photos
For me, the photos are still the star of any layout. Unless of course there is no actual photo to scrap.
We always had photos of special occassions in the family, all of which went to our numerous photo albums. There was a time though, that we didn’t have rolls of film developed. For some reason, we just put them in a shelf and we all seemed to have forgot about them.
In the days pre-digi, one could be budget conscious and would only take a few precious shots because there’s only one or two rolls of film. Sharing prints was also difficult because of the costs. Most of the time, we’d only print once and then share the negatives to those who would like to have reprints.
With digital cameras, we are now only limited to the size of storage we carry. Sharing is a snap too.
Photos are the number one digiscrapping ingredient that needs to be organized properly.
The My Pictures folder in my PC serves as my main dumping ground for photos. In the past, I never really thought about organizing photos. Each time I import photos from the camera to the PC, it just goes to one folder which I later rename (or not).
With my computer having crashed and reloaded several times through the years, I have lost some pictures (and videos) of important milestones. When I bought an external hard drive (EHD) and started organizing the files that I was to dump in there for safekeeping, I realized that I had so many picture folders all over the place. I had a hard time keeping track of them all!
From the scattered folders in the EHD, I used the My Pictures folder on my secondary drive as the root directory for all my photos. The ones I could easily group and identify, I placed in sub-folders with the event and year as titles.
There’s also a folder for my nephew Esban, within it are sub-folders depending on the occasions the pictures were taken.
Now, for newer photos, I have folders for each month. In them are sub-folders for each batch of photos taken.
Though we still have one more week in August, I already have a folder filled with this month’s photos – August 2008. It’s sub folders include Mama’s North Trip and Trinoma-UP friends; on the main folder itself are a number of random photos I’ve taken of our pets, the kids, and whatever else caught my fancy.
If you thought I’d actually have a tip here or a structure you could follow for organizing your photos, I’m sorry to disappoint. Ultimately, you gotta go with what will work for you.
I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for some time now but the last time I imported photos, I was disappointed with it. I am seriously considering finally using Windows Live Photo Gallery at home. I mentioned these two applications because they are both free, and have a functionality that will make even the least organized person, have organized photos.
TAGS
It doesn’t matter in which folder you saved your photos, if you tag them properly, it will be easy to track them down.
Tags are keywords or categories you can attach to your photos to easily identify them. These are saved on the photo’s metadata. In Picasa, or WLPG, you can run a search for specific tags, and the photos bearing them will be shown to you.
Say for example that I wanted to scrap a layout of each kid in our family opening their Christmas presents. I can run a search on my software for the following tags: Christmas, gifts, kids, plus the name of one kid. After I pick the photo, I can change the name in my string, run the search, and choose another.
Tagging will also help us organize the rest of the contents our digi-stash. More on that next time. 🙂
EDITED:
Here are the pages I’ve made so far for my mini-album:
It is no news that I maintain a digiscrapping blogroll. This is mostly of designer/scrapper blogs that often offer freebies. I have it setup in Blogrolling.com and I just copy/paste the code to any site I want it placed. Instead of text links, some of my favorite freebie digs are represented by their blinkies.
To save time when blog hopping, I used the blogroll feature to have a distinction for blogs that were updated within the last 24 hours. Those blogs have this symbol next to their name/blinkie: *
The blogroll itself seems to work just fine and I’ve never really had a problem with it. Until now.
I put up a separate page on this blog for the roll: http://verabear.net/digital-scrapbooking-links/. Problem is, when I go to that page, the blinkies are all missing! Thinking that it may be a server issue for blogrolling, I open my old blog to check that the blinkies are not showing their either. The thing is, the blinkies are showing up just fine :s
Here are the photos of the same blogroll setup on two different pages but using the exact same code and coming from the exact same source:
Blogroll in the new page
Blogroll in Blogspot
Where could it be going whacko? Is my blog blocking the blinkies from my Picasa Web uploads?
Aside from the missing blinkies, I also have missing avatars.
When I’m in my Admin Dashboard going through the comments, I can see the MonsterID avatar next to the commenters. But reading the comments as a blog reader, I don’t see them! Do you?
So I don’t know what to do about that.
Next, and the most annoying of all. I can’t seem to get the subscribe to comments pluginto work!
I’ve tested it several times but the subscriber is not getting any email notifications.
