You see, I'm this weirdo who develops serious guilt issues if I don't include a photo of Every.Single.Person who was at an event on my layouts. Do you have any idea what that does to page design mojo? It kills it!! Not because I don't want to include everyone, but because it seriously cramps my page making style to have to put eleventy billion pictures on a page. I feel like there's no room for the page to breathe when it's so full, and oxygen deprivation is just soooo not cool.
So now I pick just one or two photos that I really want to scrap, like I did for the layout below (that I shared earlier this week)...
...and the rest...
...are you ready for this....because it's really (not) earth-shattering...
...go in divided page protectors.
Yup, that's my whole grand plan. The big scheme. The rest of the story, as it were. And that last bit can be taken literally, because not only are divided page protectors a really fast, easy way to include more photos, but they give me more space to include longer journaling if I want to.
They also give me more space to add some quickly-cut chunks of patterned paper in the empty spots along with a few embellishments (totally optional) if I feel like adding them. Then I just plop the page(s) down in my albums right next to the layout it goes with, and everything coordinates beautifully.
The divided page protector idea isn't anything new or earth-shattering. In fact, it's not even original- I've admired Ali Edwards' use of them for several years now, they're an integral part of what makes Becky Higgins Project Life album so accessible, and May Flaum's post about her Disney photos from last year really are what got me thinking seriously about using them.
A really awesome thing about using divided protectors is that these days they come in all kinds of configurations. My favorites are the ones that hold different numbers of horizontal and vertical 4x6 photos, like the this one that I used for the page above. Being able to print just a couple of odd-sized photos for the actual layout and then ordering the rest as standard 4x6 prints saves so much editing, resizing, and cropping time that I used to spend in Photoshop. And later if I decide I want to scrapbook a layout using a photo in a divided protector, the image file is still there in Lightroom where I can export and print it at any size, and it's a mere 13 cents at my local Sam's Club to have a 4x6 processed (or I can use my 4x6 printer at home), so that's just something that I'm not even going to freak out over.
I think that this will also help me to get more photos into albums more quickly and not just keep them on my computer. Even if they're not "scrapbooked" per se, they're still in there and visible with all the rest of my memories (because goodness knows that I take waaaaaay too many photos to ever scrapbook them all, anyway).
So there you have the new "secret weapon" in my scrapbooking arsenal. And now I'm curious to know- do any of you guys scrap with divided page protectors? Do you have pages you can share? If so, link them up in the comments so we can all see!!