Scrapbooking Photos Using Less Time and Less Space

When my mother came into town recently, she brought an entire suitcase full of my old high school stuff that has been taking up space in her garage. There were tons of pictures. After going through and purging some of it, I still had a rather substantial pile of photos that I wanted to keep. So now I had a quandary: should I just put it all in a box to be forgotten again for years in my garage or should I take the endless amount of time and supplies it would take to scrapbook it all?

I enjoy scrap-booking, but I sometimes find it hard to get motivated to do it because it takes such a long time--at least it does for me because I can never just leave it simple; I always have to embellish a bit.

I thought about just putting them all in a photo album, but photo albums aren't the easiest thing to do any journaling in, and I knew I had to do some journaling because I had already forgotten a lot of details about things that had happened, names of some of the people in the pictures, when pictures were taken, etc. I didn't want to forget anything else. I want to be able to really reminisce when I look at old photos.

So I came up with a compromise. I put some mini photo books in my scrapbook. I just attached them right to a scrapbook page. This way I could still make a cute scrapbook, but I didn't have to actually cut and paste each of the photographs I wanted to keep. Here is how I did it:

First I got some mini photo albums that I was okay with cutting apart (making sure they were archival safe). I had these just hanging around, but you can find these pretty inexpensively all over the place. Then I used a razor knife to cut out the pages, which I then assembled into small groups of 6 to 12 pages and stapled them along either the top or the side edge (making sure to leave an open side for the pictures to slide into).

Then I inserted some pictures and stapled or tied the photo booklet onto a scrapbook page. For pages that were not heavy weight enough to hold the booklets well, I attached a piece of card stock (or one of the photos I had decided to throw away) to the back of the sheet where the booklet would go before I stapled the photo booklet onto the page.

Next I slid the page into the page protector and marked the spot where the booklet sat on the page.

Then I removed the scrapbook page and inserted my handy dandy cutting mat. If you do not have a cutting mat, then I'm sure a piece of cardboard would work just fine. Then I cut a small rectangle just the length of the booklet out of the page protector with my razor knife. Now I had a small window out of which to slide my photo booklet pages. This way, the rest of the page is still protected by the page protector, but I can still flip through the booklet of pictures without removing the entire page from its plastic cover.

And I got all my photos into my scrapbook in a much shorter amount of time, and in fewer pages, than it would otherwise have taken.