51 Photos & 14 Layouts in 2 Hours

Ever find yourself with a pile of photos that need to be scrapped by a certain date?  I started a scrapbook for our Chinese foreign exchange daughter a few months ago. I wanted to finish it with layouts of all the past few months' activities before her departure this week.  With just three days left and still cramming in everything we can before she goes, the task seemed impossible.  However, after taking it head on, there were 3 secrets that made it possible.

My 3 Secrets to creating 14 layouts using 51 photos in less than 2 hours:

Lightroom Photo Organization: using the process I teach in this class if there is one thing I am consistent on, it is downloading my photos and following my process of culling, rating, keywording and captioning the photos I want to scrap while the memories are fresh in my mind.  

Quite frankly, if I never scrapbooked a photo again and just followed this process, my family would have everything they need with my photos and memories.  Following this process not only helps me put together layouts quickly, it also gives me peace of mind when I don't have time in my life to scrapbook or find myself in a creative rut.  

Templates: I used to feel guilty for collecting and using digital templates in scrapbooking - as if their presence in my stash somehow made me less of a scrapbooker.  Today I can confidently say that templates are a fabulous resource for even the best designers.

Having worked on design teams where I spent hours creating layouts that were then made into quick pages and templates, I know I can create great pages from scratch.  However, with so much life around me to live, I'd rather spend it making memories rather than creating pages.  

Don't get me wrong, when I feel inspired I create from scratch, but 90% of the time you'll find me digging into a template stash of designers' work I admire.  My new motto? Totally Time Smart Templates = Life More Fully Lived.  Seriously, cut yourself a break and dig into your template stash more often!

The templates I chose for this project were very photo heavy with room to share stories.  You all know of my love for Cathy Z's templates - all the way back to my paper scrapbooking days.  In this project I modified the cover page (as seen above) of her All About Me album from this class (a class I highly recommend btw) and also her story telling template found here.  I also chose to use coordinating papers from the Rejuvenate kit by Sahlin Studios.

The other templates I used in this project are among my latest favorites.  I can't wait to use them again and again as I work to catch up on documentation of our daily life for 2011.  This first set can be found here.  This particular project is 8.5 x11.  I also grabbed the 12x12 size as I want to document things in a 12x12 scrapbook with all different sizes of layouts.  

These templates are a speed scrapping secret - many have just photos with worstrips and others have space for a nice group of photos and just the right amount of journaling like these (I also purchased them in 12x12 here):

Journaling:  This ties into the Lightroom Photo Organization, but still needed mentioning as I have a time-saving tip for you.  Getting ready to journal I was able to go to the photos I wanted to use and cut and paste their captions into a master journaling document - so as I worked on the pages, I could just cut and paste the journaling into the layout.  Easy peasy!

I also copied information from the website of the National Park we visited - it may seem dry but it is exactly the information Jess will want when remembering the places we visited and what makes them sites of interest here in the states.

Another time saving tip I learned recently from Julianne Kost.  When captioning your photos, you may run into several photos that need the same caption.  This is easy to do without selecting them all on the grid at once.  Enter the caption for the first photo and then on subsequent photos click on the word Caption in the metadata panel (You can't see me pointing to the word caption here - but this will give you a good idea where it is in Lightroom):

Then after clicking on Caption just choose your caption from the recent captions on the drop down menu.

This whole little project has me completely excited to delve into my Project 365 layouts this year - with my Lightroom Photo Organization, Templates, and easy Journaling solutions I am sure to create pages my family will love in much less time than I would have spent using traditional methods.  

I LOVE technology!  

PS - Thanks so much to all of you for your comments and email on Inquiring Minds.  With your feedback I have about ten pages of ideas to go from as I continue to write posts here.

 

Comments

[Judy Edelstein]

Thanks so much for this post. The links you provided for Oscrap templates are PSD files, so how do you use those templates in light room? Thanks.

[Kayla Lamoreaux]

So glad you asked this! We have been talking so much about Lightroom here lately that I forgot to say that I created the layouts using those templates in Photoshop. I have a few tutorials on this blog about templates here: http://www.digiscrap101.com/template/

Scroll down past the "Scrapbooking in Lightroom" post and you will see a few tutorials - my favorite are for the Biograffiti Project 365 templates. You can watch the video for Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS they are both there.

Hope that helps!

[Linda]

Thanks for the tip on clicking the word caption to access the previous journaling! I've gone back and added journaling in the caption spot for May and June. I'm especially liking it as I upload my photos for the day, my reflections are so much more detailed. I will go back and add journaling for photos since January, it may not have as much detail, but it may trigger some stories. What a wonderful idea!

[carm hernandez]

Kayla, I just started Stacy's Photo Freedom class, and I am so lucky that I started organizing my scrapbook supplies first, thank you for the recommendation!!! Mistakes I made while organizing my scrapbook supplies has helped me know more now that I am about to start organizing my photos!!! Thank you so much!!