Preserve your Photos by Converting them to a Digital Format

          Scrapbooking taught us to cut and crop our photos. But, in digital form, you can reshape and resize your photo, while still retaining the original copy for future use.
           This can definitely come in handy.  When my children were babies, I would go crazy taking one photo after another of their beautiful faces.  Place these photos in a traditional scrapbook, and after the tenth page, it will get a bit boring, no matter how cute the subject.  Yet, when the photos are digital, you can reduce the image, and create a page with a dozen or so miniature pictures.  I’ve done this with school photos, which allows you to see how the person has changed over the years, without flipping a page. Your pictures aren’t digital?  Don’t worry, we will get to that a bit later.
          Just like traditional scrapbooking, you can easily add clip art and backgrounds.  It can also be less expensive, if of course, you already have a computer, printer, scanner, and Internet access. 
          My first venture into digital scrapbooking was by using scrapbook software. It was fun, and I enjoyed playing around with the different fonts, backgrounds and clip art.  The programs are relatively inexpensive, and at the time, I would not have considered using my word processor – Microsoft Word -  for scrapbooking. For one thing, the old World was pretty awkward with photo editing. 
         When giving someone an album, I normally include a CD, with a copy of all the images in JPEG format.  This allows them to print an individual picture that they would like to frame or share.  But I also want to include a copy of the album on the disk.  That way, they could reprint the album, or one of its pages. Unfortunately, this is not always possible when using a scrapbook software program that creates its own unique file type, making it necessary for you to have the program before printing off copies of the pages.           
          Having the ability to easily reproduce a photo album can be very comforting if there is a fire, or if the day comes when the album is being passed on to the children, and more than one child would like a copy of the book. (More)