Printing Digital Pages

I get this question a lot. Do we print our digital scrapbooks? Of course. There are several ways to do it. One is on your own printer, but most of us don't have a printer that prints 12x12 which is the optimal scrapbook size. Once you have a square page made, you can print it any size you want. Some people print 8x8 or other formats that aren't square.

Studies have shown, however, that it costs twice as much to print at home as it does to have it printed at one of the many services available to us. We have found that the best place to get prints is Costco. When you finish a page, upload it to them and specify which store, and it will be ready for you in 1 hour for $3. Sometimes when my mom gets the urge to make a page for some of her grandchildren, she uploads the page to their store, one as far away as Kansas City, then we, the moms can go pick it up ourselves. (we love this, as you can guess.) Several of my friends like to have their pages printed and mailed to them. I haven’t yet tried this site but I will soon. It is Scrapbooks to Share. They are a company based out of Florida and they are very reasonably priced. Another thing you have to be aware of is shipping charges. This one charges $6 an order. If you ordered 50 pages at once, that is a good deal, but if you order one page for $1 and paid $6 shipping, then your page costs $7.

But the best way is to put your pages together in a book and have it printed by an Internet company, as we did the Family Proclamation. This is even less expensive than Costco, the turn-round time is usually only one day, and the books are beautifully printed, and guaranteed to be as long-lasting as it's possible to be. My sister Heidi just did a book for the kids' great grandmother in Germany. Shutterfly sent it directly there for her, which saved a lot of trouble.

One of the problems of archiving traditional scrapbooking is that there's only one copy of it. With digital you can order as many copies as you want. We have four married kids in our family and my mom ordered a book for each family with the instructions to open the package Christmas Eve and read it to their children as part of that evening's spiritual home evening. In making the book, I made sure that each family had pictures in the book and that the grandchildren were equally represented.

There are so many advantages to digital scrapbooking. It's far less expensive. You buy (or get free) digital paper and embellishments on the Internet, download them any time night or day, use them over and over in different ways, change their color at the click of your mouse if you need to. If you're cramped for space, all you need is your computer--no more paper, glue, scissors, etc. scattered all over the place.

It's faster. Young mothers tell me all the time that this is the only way they keep up on their kid's baby books. Some soccer moms take their laptop to practices, lessons, etc. and work on scrapbooking while waiting for their kids. Grandmothers are also interested in it because as they get older and can’t move around much, it’s a worthwhile hobby that’s fun and valuable at the same time.

Another advantage that I love is sharing our pages with friends and family by email as soon as they are finished. I send pages to a friend on the other side of the country and she gets them in minutes if not seconds. If I have a large group of pages, I put them on the web in Picasa Web albums and my friends can look at them and download them if they want to.