Q | I just started blogging my scrapbooking. (Just got accepted to a creative team, yay!) I’m struggling a bit with balancing privacy and visibility. Up to now my scrapbook layouts pretty much just went up on Facebook for my friends & family to see. But now that I have a blog and a brand new Twitter account I’m a little freaked out. Real name here, pics of family there, and potentially crazy people around every turn! How do you manage it?

A | My personal information was a very closely guarded secret for me for a lot of years, having been “heavily embedded” in the Internet since back in the pay-by-the-hour for AOL days. At this point I share quite a bit of personal information in a lot of different areas online, where people can see it, and the biggest reason for that shift was my involvement in the scrapbooking community. I had to ask myself what I really wanted out of this experience and it really boiled down to this:

• I saw great potential, through memory keeping, for both personal and creative growth.
• I have always believed that the best way to grow is through our connections with other people, whether they’re like-minded or polar opposites.
• There are no large groups of digital scrapbookers in my area (that I know of).

I can document our lives and my innermost thoughts without sharing a single morsel of it with anyone outside my close circle of friends and family, if having shelves of finished albums were my only goal. However, I reached a point in my life where I felt as though I wanted more, and where felt as though there was great potential for something more deeply-rewarding within this community.

It has not let me down.

The rewards have far exceeded any concessions I have made on the personal side, but you have to answer that question for yourself. Sharing so much of my personal life on the Internet has required that I put a lot of trust in people who are, effectively, strangers. In an ideal world we would all be able to convert all of our closest girlfriends and family members to digital scrapbookers and we could grow as artists with one another. I’ve been largely unsuccessful at accomplishing this, so far. Even if I did manage to get them all on board with the idea I have found deeper pools of trust, support and self-awareness in some of my online relationships than I have in many of my “real-life” relationships. I don’t think I could walk away from that.

That being said, I do have a few lines in the sand as far as what I will and won’t share publicly in the name of scrapbooking. One example is that I remove (via cropping or creative Photoshop retouching) any instances of my son’s last name on any pages I post online. He and I have different last names and in the rare instances where his appears in a photo (school projects) or in my journaling (references to his dad’s side of the family, for instance) I remove them. I do the same for any references to his school, including his teachers’ names, which I abbreviate in my journaling.

On purely a respect level, I don’t post anything about him that he wouldn’t freely admit to another person or  any photos that I know he would be uncomfortable with other people seeing. This means I have some pages in our printed albums that have never been seen online. For example any pages that have photos or journaling that deal with something he has struggled with emotionally, medically or academically – those are just for us. He’s also a very modest kid so he has always had full creative control over any summer photos I use of him without a shirt on (swimming photos). If you go through my online galleries you’ll notice that the majority of those pages feature closely-framed head shots or photos where he was in deeper water, but he has approved a few wider shots on an individual, purely arbitrary “I look awesome in that one” basis.

Like this photo will forever be one of my favorite summer photographs of him:

You also will never find a photo of him in the bathtub, at any age, anywhere in my galleries – that’s just a no fly zone for him whether he was 6 months old or 6 years old.

I follow the same rules for pages about myself or my husband, but … for different reasons. I don’t know if you could see photos of me in the bathtub and still want to hang out. I don’t think we have that kind of relationship.

And it goes without saying that I don’t post on my blog or any social media site about a vacation we’re on or about anything else that would create any sort of security-related fiasco for ourselves. Like you’ll never see me posting photos of my diamond tiara room or my Scrooge McDuck-style vault filled with gold coins and priceless artifacts.

That would just be irresponsible of me.

What Say You? Everybody In!

If you have any advice, tips, tricks or encouragement to offer on this topic please weigh-in in the comments below. I know everyone has different perspectives on online privacy and where they draw the line when it comes to scrapbooking, specifically. I’d love to hear yours!

Or if you have any other questions about … anything .. that you’d like me to ramble on about? You can post those here or shoot me an email if you’re bashful.

I sent a quick email off to The Flock and received these answers:

CHRISTINE | Probably not an answer she wants to hear, but if she’s concerned about privacy, then she may need to reconsider being on a creative team. The whole purpose of the creative team is to showcase and  market the designer’s products.  The photos/layouts would be posted everywhere.  She doesn’t need to use her real name though.  And nobody needs to know where she lives.  I have seen people post layouts with their kids’ faces blurred out.  Really NOT a big fan of that.  To me it totally distracts from the layout and you might as well not post it publicly.  The blurred faces actually sort of freaks me right out.  I’m staring at THAT instead of looking at how pretty the layout is.

ALEXIS | I used to blog my scrapbook layouts (and I still would, but am lazy, too!) but honestly I don’t think that many friends and family see my blog. Unfortunately that is the nature of the beast (the Internet). I AM careful about NOT posting my location (which is why I cannot understand the appeal of Foursquare), but for the most part I am an open book. But then again, I also don’t have my own kids to think about. :/

On Android

Q |  I’m sure I missed this, but have you said what kind of tablet you have? I’m in the market for one and yours looks fantastic. And most importantly to me, I know you are not an apple girl. I’m not either and I want to stick with windows/android. Anyway, I’d love to know what tablet you have and if it syncs up with your phone or computer?

A | I have an Asus Transformer (TF-101) which is the previous generation of their tablet (the Transformer Prime TF-201) is the current generation. The reason I chose the Asus was because there’s an available keyboard dock that turns the entire thing into a 10″ netbook of sorts. As for synchronizing, most of my “things” are cloud-based at this point so everything is accessible across all my devices. I’m heavily entrenched in Google as far as email and calendar go, so that’s all integrated into the OS for me. For transferring of individual files I can hook the tablet up via USB to my computer, or it has an SD card slot so I can bring files along with me that way. I mainly rely on Dropbox for files I want to access on multiple devices, though.

Q | Loved Peppermint’s pick this week – my new Android phone will be arriving soon and I would love it if Peppermint would make a list of all her favorite Android apps. Pretty please!

A |  I download and try out a lot of apps (because I hate to think that I might miss out on something awesome) then I wind up uninstalling the majority of them because I don’t actually use them. The ones that are heavily used and that I couldn’t manage without are:

• Dolphin Browser – I use it instead of the stock browser (which is Chrome) on both my phone and my tablet because I use LastPass to handle most of my passwords and it just integrates so nicely with the Dolphin Browser. Also I can set it up to always access the desktop versions of websites instead of defaulting to the mobile one. I hate mobile sites (even though I have one on this site). Dolphin Browser also has a feature called “Sonar” that lets me web browse via voice recognition, which blows Nicholas’ mind, and also it has screen “gestures” that I can program so that I can draw something on my screen and have it assigned to a bookmark. I don’t like typing on a touch screen that much, so these features eliminate a lot of that for me.
• Feedly – I use Feedly as my RSS reader (it syncs with Google Reader) on every device – computer, phone & tablet. Lately my phone is where I manage to catch up on the majority of my blog reading since I always have it on me when I find myself with some spare time.
• Dropbox – to keep files accessible between all my devices, especially photos taken with my phone or tablet. I have auto-upload enabled for all photos and videos, so a few seconds after I take the photo I can access it on my computer.
• Evernote – if you’re not an Evernote user this will be useless, but I have all my recipes stored in Evernote, so I use this app a lot when I’m at the grocery store and want to look at the ingredient list for something or for when I’m in the kitchen actually cooking.
• Gentle Alarm – there may be dozens of other alarm clock apps available, but I’ve used this one since I got my phone and have never had any complaints about it. My phone is also my alarm clock, since it charges on my nightstand every night while I sleep. The main things that I love about Gentle Alarm are that it allows me to use my own music as the alarm (either an individual track or a playlist I have set up on my phone) and it has a “fade in” setting that makes the alarm start out at a very low volume and gradually build. When I DO manage to sleep, which can be a bit touch and go for me, I don’t appreciate being startled awake. Plus I have a husband who is on a different schedule than I am and I’m a very light sleeper, so I wake up even when the music is still really faint. Plus it’s always more pleasant to wake up to one of my favorite songs.
• SwiftKeyX Keyboard – Frankly the most intuitive keyboard I’ve used, and I’ve tried several on my phone. I’m not a fan of the stock touch keyboard on my DroidX, and I’m slightly more pleased with Swype, but SwiftKeyX has really amazing auto-complete that saves me a ton of keystrokes (and it’s constantly learning, so it’s hip to my typical vocabulary). Plus the voice recognition is nothing short of brilliant, which is what tips the scales for me. I rely on that voice input a lot, because (as I said above) I’m not a fan of touch screen typing. I’m fast at it, especially with this keyboard, but I still like to take the lazy way out. (On my tablet I use Thumb Keyboard, because SwiftKeyX didn’t have a tablet version yet. Now they do, but I’m used to the other one.)
• TweetDeck – I use the desktop version to manage my Twitter account, so I also use it on my devices. If you use HootSuite they have an app, also. I used TweetDeck, switched to HootSuite for a while, then moved back to TweetDeck. I’m not great with change. I use Facebook’s app for Facebook, but overall I don’t check in a ton on social media with my phone or tablet. They’re sort of my safe, quiet place.
• Zedge - I like regular, non-song, short and mellow ringtones. So I use the search term “Business Notifications” in Zedge and it brings up tons of options that are only a couple of seconds long and very inconspicuous. If you’re into funkier ringtones they have plenty of those, too. All of them free and easy to download and activate right from within the app.
• Jewels Star – I have to throw one game in, and games change over time for me. A member of The Flock (pointing at Becky Derby) is a fellow Android user and from time to time we sabotage one another’s lives by recommending a particular game that’s consuming our days. This is the latest game that she sent me a heads up on, and the amount of time I spend playing it (to get THREE STARS ON EVERY LEVEL) is really not something I’m proud of, but everyone has their vices.

On Food

Q | I want to know what four recipes you always keep ingredients on hand for? Coming up with ideas is the hardest part for me! I would love some of your ideas!

A | This one is from Episode 38 of The Digi Show where we discussed our “Life Hacks” and I said that I had 4 recipes that are “go to recipes” for me on busy nights, and I try to keep ingredients on hand for at least two of them at any given time and at this point they’re so embedded in my life that I can make any of them from memory.

The reason they’re versatile is because they use a lot of shelf-stable ingredients, they use up leftover portions of more perishable items used in other recipes, and the last two especially can be varied up to use whatever meat or veggies I happen to have on hand. We’re not a family of picky eaters, so your mileage may vary with these:

• Spaghetti with Artichoke Hearts and Tomatoes (via The Pioneer Woman)  - one of the few recipes I make that uses canned anything, but it’s super easy for me to keep a couple of cans of artichoke hearts and diced tomatoes in the pantry. We always have pasta of some sort, and I also keep heavy cream on hand perpetually because it’s an ingredient in a lot of recipes I make. This recipe uses up any leftover heavy cream I may have from other recipes, so I add it to the menu in an effort to be frugal and not toss that out. It’s also meat-free (but not vegetarian!) so it’s cheap and easy to make.
• Breakfast for Dinner – a family favorite. We almost always have eggs, bacon and baking staples on hand for this particular pancake recipe (except I use butter, margarine is evil) or these Swedish thin pancakes if I have leftover fruit to use up (I add a teaspoon of vanilla to the batter and it’s exactly like I remember from my childhood). I never make breakfast for actual breakfast, I don’t like heavy breakfasts. Perfect dinner fare, though.
• Buffalo Turkey Burgers with Blue Cheese Dressing (from Rachel Ray’s 365 No Repeats cookbook) – I stock up on ground turkey or ground chicken whenever it’s on sale, and we always have celery and green onions around because I use them in a lot of other recipes. I use Marzetti Ultimate Blue Cheese dressing because we always have it on hand. This is just an all around great poultry burger recipe, and for Nicholas I omit the hot sauce bath at the end and put regular burger fixings on his. For those who are anti-blue-cheese, ranch dressing or plain sour cream are fine, too. The most I ever have to do for this recipe is stop at the store for hamburger buns, which we don’t keep on hand. (If you’re feeling Greek, you can make these without the hot sauce and top them with some feta cheese, red onion and cucumber slices and kalamata bruschetta. If you’re feeling Asian you can add some minced ginger and teriyaki sauce to the meat and top with broccoli slaw tossed with a little lime juice, minced ginger and teriyaki. It’s really adaptable.) The only thing I will say is different about this online recipe as opposed to the original – and I feel like it’s a big deal – is that it’s not just any two stalks of celery – it’s two of the small ones from the VERY inside of the bunch. The ones that are really light yellow and mostly leaf. Chop up just the leafy bits from two of those inner stalks – that’s where the good stuff is at.
• Thai Peanut Satay – I’m insane for peanut sauces. As far as I’m concerned any recipe with peanut butter in it is a good recipe.  This one is good for using up random vegetables that are nearing their demise, like broccoli or carrots. I don’t include all the vegetables in the recipe, I just toss in whatever is around. I always have these shelf-stable Asian ingredients on hand (including the Sriracha – it’s my go-to heat for most recipes, Asian and Mexican alike). The only wild card is the ginger root, so this recipe makes it into the rotation when I have ginger root leftover from another recipe. I’ve made it with chicken, beef and shrimp. I have no complaints about any of them.

On Shadowing

Q | I love your “Mind Blowing Drop Shadow Tutorial” and have it printed out on my desk because I was wearing the bookmark out! The one thing you don’t really talk about is how you shadow things like lace, loosely woven fabrics and wispy things like tulle and feathers (specifically the tulle in your Worn collab with Sahlin Studio, which I can’t manage to get a realistic shadow on). Any tricks for those?

Yup! But I’m hoping you’re a Photoshop user, because I’m not entirely sure if these same options are available in PSE. (These are the settings for the “Lace & Fabric” layer style in my Shadow Like Me Styles, though, so hopefully those work in PSE!)

For tulle, lace, and “light wispy things”, first I apply a drop shadow with these settings:

Blend Mode: Linear Burn
Color: I use #2c1901 but whatever color you use is fine
Opacity: (varies) 15~30%
Distance: (varies) 10~20px
Size: 10px

Then I add a second Outer Glow layer effect with these settings:

Blend Mode: Color Burn
Opacity: (varies) 20~30%
Color: I use #2c1901 again
Technique: Softer
Spread: 0%
Size: (varies) 10~35%

That Outer Glow is what makes it yummy.

Got Questions?

Let ‘em fly! Hopefully I have answers!

If you happened to listen to Episode 21 of The Digi Show you heard us talk about projects – from the past, from the present, and our plans for the future. I shared how I was feeling as though I’d gotten sidetracked with regards to what makes me happy when it comes to scrapbooking, and how I was feeling as though I should focus my attention on reconnecting with that rather than taking on projects in the hopes that they’ll somehow streamline or simplify the process for me.

Projects are great for drumming up stories, but I am not in (nor have I ever been in) a story drought.

I am in a scrapbooking drought.

When I was preparing materials for my guest spot at Debbie Hodge’s site, I made the following comment on Twitter:

I wanted to “get back to 2009,” which was a year where I really felt the most in touch with my inner memory keeper. I made sure that I took time to really think about my life and what was meaningful to me in the moment, and then I spent my time conveying that on my pages.

Over the past couple of years I’ve lost sight of that. Instead of carving time out to reconnect with those stories I’ve taken on “projects” instead. Projects that gave me a way to fill my time so that I had the appearance of documenting my memories, but really I was just creating things to document while purposefully avoiding documenting them in a way that fulfills my passion

My passion is digital scrapbooking. My passion is storytelling.

A good bit of my time in 2011 was spent trying new things each week, a project that I really enjoyed but that I didn’t necessarily care to include in my scrapbooks after I had already taken up quite a bit of time writing it out on my blog. I made a choice at the beginning of the year to blog them and NOT scrapbook them and that’s the format I stuck with for time management purposes. Having them preserved here on my site was enough for me, and when it becomes not enough for me I’ll pull off relevant ones and get them into our albums.

I amassed a large storage box full of Project Life supplies and I’ve tucked little bits and pieces of everyday life into the pockets, but I was quickly reminded of the fact that I don’t enjoy paper scrapbooking. Or hybrid scrapbooking. More than that: I don’t feel GOOD at it. I feel like it takes me too much time, that I think about it way too much, and that I wind up settling on getting the pages done rather than actually liking them.

Feeling as though I’m good at what I’m doing, whether anyone else agrees with me or not, is 99% of my happiness when it comes to creativity. I am not good at gluing things down or cutting things out. I am not happy when I’m walking back and forth from my desk to my printer to load photo paper into the tray. I do not like finding little bits of paper around my office. And more than that, I do not like having bins of paper supplies, bins of adhesives, a 12×12 album and things like paper cutters and hole punches in my office. My office used to be a place of zen solitude and it was starting to resemble a crop station at a craft store.

I spent some time in July trying A Week In The Life, thinking that would scratch my memory keeping itch. But as you may recall, the enthusiasm fizzled out for me. I consider myself an “everyday scrapbooker” but that was just way too much information about my everyday. I was on information overload because I could think of something meaningful to say about most of the photos that I took – but all packed into a one week span like that, my storytelling core shut down completely. Within those photos live some stories that I want to tell, but we needed some time apart.

The common thread with all three of the projects was that they kept me really busy – busy taking pictures, busy jotting down notes, busy buying supplies and organizing supplies. All of that busy work made me feel like I was documenting our lives. But they didn’t leave me feeling fulfilled. Instead I felt like I spent my time living up to arbitrary obligations that I’d set in my own head while ignoring what I truly love – which is sitting down at my computer and pouring my heart out onto a 3600 x 3600 px canvas in Photoshop. A photo from last week, a photo from last year, an experience from today or an emotion that happened to flutter through my heart.

That is where joy lives for me.

So my only scrapbooking project for the time-being will be to carve out time in my schedule to reconnect with the process that first won my heart. The organic, free-flowing stream of creativity that ends with my story on a 12×12 digital canvas – because that’s when I remember feeling my happiest as a memory keeper.

Which is not to say that you’re anything like me, or that you find your fulfillment in the same way that I do. It’s not even to say that I’ll feel the same way a year from now, or a month from now.

I’m not always good at examining whether I’m happy with the way I choose to spend my memory keeping time WHILE I’m spending it. I haven’t been asking myself “Is this how I really want to be spending this period of time?” This free hour that I have on a Sunday afternoon – what would I like to completely lose myself in for this hour? Because I have a finite amount of time, and I want to get back to enjoying how I spend that time.

More than that I want to get back in touch with what makes me love this craft; with what inspires me rather than what’s new or flashy. I need to clear out all of the other stuff and get back to the fundamentals for a while.

After all, I have all these untold stories from 2011 that have piled up while I’ve been occupied with other distractions. It’s high time they get their time in the sun.

So my question to you is this – when are you most happy as a memory keeper?

by lifeat30
using Westover & Enlightened

by lifeat30
using Flight Plan No. 5 and Enlightened

by Becky Derby
using Epic (with Paislee Press & Biograffiti) and All Scratched Up

by Leslie Coltrain
using Epic (with Paislee Press & Biograffiti)

And a couple more from the One Little Bird Gallery at Oscraps that caught my eye:

By Raquel S
(click layout for credits)

by Tiff
(click layout for credits)

by Liahra
(click layout for credits)

November Events

• Tomorrow marks the beginning of my Digital Scrapbooking Day sale so you’ll receive more details on that later tonight! If you’re a Cage Liner subscriber, you’ll save a little more.
• You can find me Guest Teaching this month at Masterful Scrapbook Design. The month-long topic is Texture & Dimension and how different products and techniques can help you create amazing texture & dimension on both your digital and paper pages.
• As always you can listen to Steph, Katie and I on The Digi Show podcast each week talking about our favorite subject: Digital Scrapbooking.
• I’d love to hear your input on product offerings for 2012, so if you have a burning (or just a regular) desire for a product, whether it’s a color scheme, a theme, an element wish, etc. – I’m all ears! Please don’t hesitate to contact me with your ideas here on my blog, through my contact form, on my Facebook Fan page, Twitter (if you can do it in 140 char or less!) or anywhere else you can find me. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to make everything you want, but if I’m inspired to create a product based on your suggestion you’ll receive a complimentary copy of it as a show of gratitude.

The majorityof the pages in our albums are written in a present-tense voice using phrases like “You are…” and “I feel…”. When I scrapbook photos from 5 or 6 years ago I want to tell stories from that same perspective in order to have continuity in the albums (I don’t want an abrupt change in voice to “You were…” and “I felt…”) I’m just finding that I have a difficult time getting into that headspace – it feels odd.  No one else would know when looking through the finished album whether I wrote it back in 2005 or I wrote it in 2011. It’s purely a roadblock I run into right after I activate the text tool on these older pages, and it’s one I’m determined to get over.

I am working on it.

But while I work on it, a comparison page is a great compromise. I can visit the past in order to compare it to the present. When I laid eyes on this new collaboration between Paislee Press and Three Paper Peonies I felt as though they were designing just for me.

JOURNALING | 2005: man alive you were a ball of energy in constant motion. your eyes opened in the morning and your feet hit the ground within seconds. “a little downtime” was a concept you didn’t even want to try to understand – why would anyone want to sit still and observe the world around them when the option to run through it at warp speed was available? i found myself frequently exhausted just watching you go through your day, and could never understand how you didn’t collapse at the end of it. because you didn’t collapse, nicholas, not even once. people would watch you and say things like “i bet that’ll tire him out, he’ll pass out on the way home” but no, not you. you were always great about going to bed but it was more like a last resort at the end of the day – a battle of wills that your parents eventually won.

2011: in all honesty, i never really thought you’d slow down and appreciate the concept of utterly vegging out. people used to say things like “when he gets older he’ll BEG to sleep in” but i always just figured it was like all of the other little kernels of false hope for the future that parents share with one another – the ones that keep us from losing it completely. there are some people who seem to get by with very little rest, and i was beginning to fear that you were going to be one of them. little by little, though, i started to notice that i was the one waiting around for you in the morning, and you were the one who was starting to retreat to your bedroom to chill out for a while in the afternoons. isn’t that supposed to be my routine? some mornings i see glimpses of what will eventually become our new normal – me standing in your doorway, nagging you to get out of bed. i’m not sure that one scenario is better than the other, but for the time being i’m a little thankful for the break.

MATERIALS | Then & Now by Paislee Press and Three Paper Peonies; frame from Conversation Piece no. 1 by One Little Bird & Paislee Press; border from In The Loop by One Little Bird; photos processed using Fable by My 4 Hens Photography.

Ever since we did Episode 005 of The Digi Show I have been on the receiving end of a lot of judgmental looks from Desktop Yoda that I can no longer ignore.

Because Desktop Yoda knows that my creativity rises and falls in direct proportion with how organized I am. This is not true for everyone but I’m what I like to call a “Left Brain Creative”. I’m very easily overwhelmed when things stop being logical and orderly.

My digital organization used to be a real source of pride for me but it’s fallen on hard times recently. I’ve been able to keep up with some of my files, but I’ve been turning a blind eye to others. The main thing that’s been staring me in the face, though, is my photo keywording in Lightroom 3.

When I create a scrapbook page the catalyst is almost always a story – sometimes it’s just a kit I really want to use – but most of the time it’s something that’s on my mind.  The story itself is a bit of a chicken vs. egg thing, though. Sometimes the story comes first and I go looking for a photo to go along with it, other times I’m looking at a photo and find that a few thoughts start to weave themselves together in my head. Either way, the common denominator is my photos.

The YAYs and BOOs:

YAY | I have all of my photographs tagged with keywords in Lightroom.

BOO | I’ve known for a long time that my keyword structure isn’t doing me many favors.

The Problem:

When I first started adding keywords to my photographs I didn’t really put much thought into what I wanted the system to do for me. I was just pleased with myself that I was keywording them all.

In a nutshell, here’s what I did: I tagged every photo according to the people who were in it. If there were no people in it, then I would tag it under some sort of “thing”.  So the structure looked something like this in Lightroom:

• People
• Nicholas
• Tom
• Me
• Grandparent 1
• Grandparent 2
• Cousin
• Uncle
• Random Person
• That friend I have 1 photo of
• etc.
• Things
• Flowers
• Landscapes
• Legos (this is a huge category)
• Food
• etc.

Then I threw another curve ball into my organization whenever something happened where I took a lot of photos at once.

• Events
• Air Show
• Iowa Trips
• San Diego Trip
• Chicago Trip
• Nicholas Birthday 20xx
• Nicholas Birthday 20xx
• Christmas 20xx
• Christmas 20xx
• etc.

These keywords were FAR better than having no keywords at all. The problem was that I was only really adding one type of keyword to each photo. Everyday photos of Nicholas were tagged “Nicholas” but photos of Nicholas at Christmas were only tagged “Christmas 20xx”. So when I’d go through my library looking for photos of Nicholas, those would be left out of my search. Same goes for photos of him taken on a specific vacation, or at someone else’s birthday party or wedding. I was “lazy tagging” my photos with the bare minimum.

The other problem with this system was that some categories (like the Nicholas one) were really big and I had no great way to narrow them down. I encountered this when trying to find a photo of Nicholas with a certain Lego creation that he made that he wanted to look at again – and neither one of us had any idea what year it was taken in. I had to bring up every photo tagged Nicholas and then we sifted through them for about 20 minutes before we both lost interest.

I knew I needed more tags on my photos, but I knew that I didn’t need something so convoluted that my Lightroom keyword list would be filled with hundreds of keywords.

Solutions:

On the show Kayla referred to a lot of the material she had on her website about organizing things in Lightroom. So I headed over there and was happy to find that she had a lot of information on organizing photographs, too. (I was prepared to just look at her digital supply strategy and adapt it to photos.)

Her post on Lightroom Photo Keywords was my saving grace. I had SOME hierarchical tags in my system, but it never even dawned on me to approach it in a “Who, What, Where and When” manner. The nice thing about this approach is that it gives me a reference point for what kinds of tags I might want on photos. When I’m organizing, I just have to ask myself which of the 4 Ws are represented in these photos. I know I’ll always want to tag a “Who” if there is one, and then ideally I’ll tag at least one other category, too. Organizing my keywords into the parent categories of the 4Ws keeps my keyword list from becoming too cluttered over on the side and lets me easily see what sorts of keywords I’ve already used. Plus I can expand and collapse the keyword lists based on what I’m looking for.

I started by creating the “Who, What, Where and When” parent categories in my Lightroom software. For the “Who” category I followed Kayla’s example and created additional keyword categories for our family, our extended family, our friends and our pets.  Then I started moving all of my existing keywords into these categories. (This is as easy as dragging them up and down and dropping them in the Keyword List on the right side.)

I didn’t create any new keywords while doing this, I just organized the ones that were already in Lightroom. I did rename a few of my keywords, though, which Lightroom makes really easy. You can just right click on any keyword in the Keyword list and chose “Edit Keyword Tag..” and change it. Lightroom will update it on all of the photos using that tag. I mainly did this to create some consistency in the lists, like changing keywords for extended family members to “LastName_FirstName” in order to keep them together.

Once I had all of my current keywords organized, I started in on adding the additional keywords to my photos. This will be an ongoing process over the next several weeks and months.

For obvious reasons I’m starting with all of my son’s photos because those are the ones I look for most often. I’m going through them little by little and adding a “What” to some of them and this is where I’ve started creating some new keywords. For instance, in the image above I added the keyword “Swimming” to these under the “What” parent category. If you go into that Swimming category right now it will only contain pictures of him swimming, but I know we have other photos of family and friends that are water/swimming related that will eventually get added into that category.

The other thing I’ve started doing is going through our vacation and event photos and tagging the people in them. I’m doing this one vacation at a time starting with our most recent trips because those are the ones I’m most likely to go looking for right now. So now I can use a text Keyword filter in Lightroom (you can press the “\” key to bring this up in the Library module) and type in “Nicholas, Chicago” and get just the photos of him from that trip instantly. With my old method I had to go to the “Chicago Trip” category and sift through all the photos – all 1400 of them – looking for the ones with Nicholas in them.

Also this means that when I’m just looking under the “Nicholas” keyword for scrapbooking photos, those ones from Chicago will come up for me now along with all of the everyday photos I have of him.

This is a vast improvement over my previous method.

I’m sure that many people much smarter than me (like Kayla!) have already figured this sort of thing out – but it never would have dawned on me to organize my keywords like this.

The nice thing about using the parent keywords, too, is that they’re searchable in Lightroom at the parent level. So as a for instance, I have some of our extended family organized as:

• Jones Family
• Jones_Ed
• Jones_Heather
• Jones_Emily
• Jones_Aaron

If I’m looking for just pictures of Aaron, I can do a keyword search for “Jones_Aaron”. But if I want to see all my photos of their entire family, I can just type in “Jones Family” and it will bring up any photo tagged with the subcategories beneath it. Which I foresee coming in handy later in my “What” category as it grows as I start to organize a lot of our photos. I could put very specific categories under a more general parent category and be able to drill down my searches if need be. For instance if I look at the Swimming photos from earlier. Eventually they may wind up in a more general category like:

• Outdoors
• Backyard
• Swimming
• Gardening
• Raking Leaves
• Sledding
• etc.

Which would make it nice if I was looking for general outdoor photos of Nicholas (search: Nicholas, Outdoors) or specific photos just of him sledding (search: Nicholas, Sledding).

A Few Notes:

When you create category keywords like the “Who” and the “JustUs” categories, they WILL show up as metadata keywords in other programs (like Bridge, the Windows 7 OS, etc) when you view the photos in those programs. In order to keep that from happening you can right click on the category in the Keyword List, choose “Edit Keyword Tag…” and uncheck the box that says “Export Containing Keywords”. You can also uncheck this box when creating the keywords, but in my case I had some keywords I’ve already been using for a while and I had to modify those ones.

In some instances you may appreciate these parent level keywords appearing in the file’s metadata – like I wouldn’t mind if a photo of Nicholas swimming had the tags “Nicholas, Outdoors, Swimming”, so I would edit the “Outdoors” keyword to not include the containing keyword, but I would leave it checked on the “Swimming” keyword.  If I don’t  block some of the parent categories the tags on those photos would look more like “Who, JustUs, Nicholas, What, Outdoors, Swimming”.  And I don’t want that. So you can pick and choose which categories are purely for your own organization and which ones will be beneficial down the road.

One last thing you’ll want to do if you haven’t already is make a small adjustment to the Lightroom settings to make all this work portable so that your keywords show up in other applications. This option is turned OFF by default in Lightroom and I have no idea why. I imagine there must be some instance where someone would NOT want their XMP changes be written to the actual photo file, so Adobe is erring on the side of caution.

If you go to Edit > Catalog Settings > Metadata you can check the box next to “Automatically write changes into XMP” and this will write your keywords to the file so that they’re permanently a part of the metadata. This way if you choose to use a different program down the road, or are using other software that can also make use of the metadata, all your work will be transferable.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bunch of photos to tag. And the best part is that as I look through all of these and add more keywords to them my mind is spinning with all sorts of pages I have yet to make.

Organization makes me more creative!

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Storytelling, but it’s a subject that I continually think about. Lately I’ve had a few people voice their concerns/insecurities about their writing abilities which tends to move storytelling to the forefront in my mind. I’ve been “chewing on it” mentally, because I always hope that if I talk about it every once in a while it’ll flip a switch for just one more person and that’s all the motivation I need to put it out there into the world.

I’m not a psychologist or anything (derrr…) but I read a lot of motivational-type, touchy feely, “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” types of blogs because I like how they help me to put things into perspective in my everyday life.

Perspective is something I need routine refills on.

Recently I happened to read a post titled How You Can Start Living Your Miracle Life, and in it they mentioned a form of therapy called Solution Focused Therapy that looks toward the future rather than examining the past. It moves the focus to a person’s strengths by asking “What’s working?” and then building on that, rather than trying to fix all of their perceived weaknesses and faults.

The article isn’t about scrapbooking in particular (or really at all) but I found myself thinking about it tonight and something clicked with me with regards to overcoming these obstacles that seem to magically appear in front of us whenever we’re faced with something a little daunting; something a bit outside our comfort zone. When you think about it, we really apply this sort of therapy in a lot of areas of our life, we just don’t realize that we’re doing it.

Like when a class reunion starts to appear on the horizon, we think to ourselves how awesome we’d feel walking into the room a few pounds lighter, with some fresh highlights (to cover up all that emerging gray) and a killer dress. Then in the time leading up to the event we make small adjustments to get us closer to that picture we have in our minds.

Or we picture ourselves on a tropical getaway this winter, somewhere with white sandy beaches and little drinks with umbrellas – so we start making small adjustments to our everyday budget, saving a little here and there, working ahead a bit at the office so we’re not buried under work when we return. We do all of these things because we’ve imagined what that vacation would look like, feel like, even smell like – and that injects a little joy into us, which motivates us to make these otherwise uncomfortable adjustments in order to achieve that end result.

Why not apply it to our storytelling?

Solution Focused Therapy is entirely too uptight of a phrase to be interesting, so let’s just call it Scrapbooking Mind-Trickery instead.

What’s holding you back is more than likely a solid mixture of fear, self-doubt and discomfort. Maybe someone was critical of your writing in some other area of your life at one point? Maybe people seem to poke fun at your grammar a lot, you failed a Creative Writing course in college, or someone else told you about an embarrassing experience they had and it was enough to mortify you for life? I don’t know what the catalyst was, but perhaps a little bit of our newly named Scrapbooking Mind-Trickery can help you break through these barriers.

Whenever I hear someone talk about their journaling road blocks, I can’t help but think to myself “This is someone who really WANTS to be journaling on their pages, otherwise it wouldn’t be on their mind at all.” You wouldn’t be beating yourself up over something you never wanted to do in the first place. So at some point you must have heard someone else (or multiple someone elses) talk about how rewarding they’ve found their own storytelling journey to be and that resonated with you. The seed was planted, and it painted a picture in your head of what your memory keeping experience might look like if you could add this piece of the puzzle to your projects.

What you should do is really sit down and examine that picture – not as it applied to their lives, but as it would appear in yours. Your family, gathered around those albums – weeks from now, years from now, decades from now. What will it look like when they’re reading your heartfelt words – run-on sentences, bad grammar and all? Doesn’t it look amazing?

And then … start taking small steps towards that picture each time you sit down in front of a page. A little blurb here, a few more details there. Ease yourself in with the “whos, whats and wheres” and then slowly add in a little bit of your perspective each time.

No crushing, creativity-killing pressure to accomplish it all overnight – just a baby step with each page.

Ask yourself “What one little thing can I do this time that I haven’t done yet?” until the picture in your head becomes a reality.

These pages document a day trip we took to the Museum of Science & Industry while we were in Chicago in June. Both Tom and I were taking pictures so I must have had a couple hundred photos by the time we left.

I struggled with a plan for these photos initially – I wanted to write a bit about each of the exhibits that we visited, but I also wanted to include my own journaling so that the page didn’t feel too clinical and impersonal. I think I left them laying on my work table for at least four days before I figured out a solution that accomplished both tasks.

I decided to reprint the photos and overlay the information about each exhibit on the photos themselves – just the name of the exhibit and a short explanation for each that I pieced together by combining information from the museum map (which we kept) and the museum’s website.

Doing so let me reserve the journaling spaces for my actual journaling about the experience. I wrote a bit about the eclectic little restaurant we ate at before heading downtown (where my son had a bacon waffle that he’s still talking about) – the the other two cards had details from the museum trip.

I managed to pare them down to a “highlights” card with a few of our favorite experiences – like the Tesla coil in the Science Storms exhibit that totally freaked Nicholas out, and the water fountain near the chemistry exhibit that attacked me and essentially ended our museum trip.

These are just cards that I created in Photoshop and printed on matte photo paper.

The facing page holds a few more exhibit photographs, then I folded up the map and tucked it into the top right pocket. It’s a little bulky but it had so much information on it that I think it will be fun to look at again in the future.

This bottom 8×6″ pocket holds the wedding invitation for the pages that I shared previously. I slid a sheet of cardstock behind the invitation and adhered this Vintage Travel Transparency from 7 Gypsies to the cardstock, leaving the one long side open so that I could store our museum tickets, our parking receipt and other assorted paraphernalia in a way that didn’t require separate pockets for each.

All in all I managed to fit a lot of text into these two pages without sacrificing photo space.

I’m working backward and forward in time – I have pocket pages that are partially filled here and there as I retrace our steps through the month of June, gathering all of the little bits and pieces of our summer so far. I did manage to finish this section from a wedding we attended a couple of weeks ago, though, so I wanted to share these pages today. These pages went together in a snap because I had already edited the photos and written about them here on my blog.

So far I haven’t been following any specific formula to how I approach this project and that means I feel no pressure as I’m working. I’m arranging the pages chronologically but it’s not a photo-a-day. My goal is to have no specific goal – to just enjoy the change of pace and process that goes along with recording these moments in paper form. I can work in little bite-sized pieces and feel like I’ve finished a little something if a few pockets are now full. Immediate gratification.

I used a We R Memory Keepers page protector (from their 12×12 Multi-Pack) here because I wanted to be able to include the wedding invitation and the 6×8″ pocket on this page worked perfectly once I flipped it upside down in the album.

At the wedding had these pretty little handmade fans that also served as the wedding program and I just adored them. I used an American Crafts 6×12″ page protector in order to include it along with the photographs. I didn’t want to glue it down because I like the idea of being able to remove it from the sleeve to look at it at a later date, so in order to keep it from sliding around I cut two small slits into the page protector and pulled the original ribbon (used to tie the fans shut) through and tied it on the outside of the page sleeve. I also added a little key charm that I had floating around in my “Big Big Box of Random Supplies” in order to feel fancy about the whole thing.

I was a little worried that by cutting the page protector that it might continue to tear, but it doesn’t seem to have compromised it at all and I like having the tactile feel of the ribbon outside of the plastic – it gives it a little dimension.

We had two copies so I opened up the second one and placed it on the other side of the page sleeve, open to the page with the Wedding Service details. It’s attached to a piece of cardstock so it can be pulled out and flipped through. As a digital scrapbooker, the idea of  people being able to remove these things from our album and leaf through them appeals to me in a big way, so I was mindful not to attach anything too permanently. I want the album to remain very interactive, both for us and for others looking through it.

I also liked how, when flipped over, the 6×12″ sleeve covered the photos on the opposing page and created a nice, blocked display of all of the important wedding details at  a glance. It pleased my inner obsessive compulsive.

I finished this section of the album off with one of the Project Life Design B page protectors containing a few more of our favorite photos, a bit of journaling with our personal thoughts about the weekend and a couple more odds and ends that we collected along the way – the printed map that guided us around Green Bay, a receipt for our meal the next day and a photo of the restaurant. Easy as that.

A few notes on my workflow:

• I created a Collection within Lightroom called “Project Life” then marked it as my Target Collection. When I import the photos off of my camera into Lightroom, I can take a quick spin through them and press the letter B for any that catch my eye and they get added to that Project Life Collection instantly. I’ve written about this method of organization before here: Lightroom Trick – Tagging Photos to Scrap. It’s easy enough to change the Target Collection, so when I want to mark photos for regular scrapbooking I just right click on my “Photos to Scrap” collection and mark it as the Target Collection again. Over in the Collections dialogue Lightroom puts a “+” sign next to the current Target Collection, so I just check it each time to make sure I’m on the right one. I don’t post-process or edit the photos at this time, I’m just pulling them out so they’re easily accessible.
• After a lot of back and forth, I chose to print my photos here at home in order to keep me on track and let me work on the album in little doses as I go along. I know my own weaknesses, and sending photos out to a lab and then running out to pick them up is something that I would put off for weeks at a time. I have a Canon Pixma printer that creates borderless 4×6 prints, so when I have a free moment I load up that Project Life Collection and print a few out directly from Lightroom. Then I just collect any accompanying memorabilia and start tucking things into the album.
• I find myself to be way more mindful of all the little trinkets and things that I normally wouldn’t keep, but what’s most surprising is that my husband is turning out to be even more mindful of it. He remembers to grab an extra copy of something that he thinks I may want to use, and he has the presence of mind to keep things like table place cards, receipts, ticket stubs and product packaging. When we get home he leaves these stacks of items on the work table in my office and I tuck them all away into a 12×12 storage box that I keep underneath it. Collecting all these little items plays to his strengths more than it does mine, so I’m pleasantly surprised that this has turned out to be a collaborative process between the two of us. My son is a natural at keeping everything that passes through his hands, also, so a quick rifle through his piles of keepsakes usually turns up some great treasures.

I’ve been a Jeep lover since February 2007 when I took mine for a test drive. I drove no more than 20 feet and was ready to buy it. I joined the so-called “Jeep Cult” right then and there, and despite it being the most finicky vehicle I’ve ever owned I am adamant that I will never drive anything other than a Jeep for the rest of my days.

But that’s not why I liked this ad campaign – I’d have liked it if it were a Ford or a Honda campaign all the same. Because what caught my attention was the “Genetically Engineered to be…” tagline and I was instantly inspired to create.

JOURNALING: It’s a roll of the dice really, having a child. You hope that they’ll be blessed with all of your strengths and spared all of your weaknesses. Of course it doesn’t always turn out that way. I would say that you have an even mix of both, plus a few traits that seemingly appeared out of thin air. I find myself constantly noting how each bit of your character could serve you in the future, like how your passion would serve you well as a politician, or your love for research would make you a great scientist. Little glimpses of everything you could turn out to be, but only time will tell which path you take. You’re still building upon all of that, afterall. Whether you’re a scientist, a teacher, a politician or a monster truck driver (your career choice at 4 years old) I know you’ll be amazing at whatever you choose to do. It’s just who you are.

MATERIALS: Air Time and Little Honeybee (airplane trail) by One Little Bird; Font is Eames Century Modern by House Industries.

How To

The clouds from Air Time are actually stickers, but they just weren’t working right as stickers for my page. I quickly turned them into faint stamps on my background paper by changing the blend mode to “Darken” and bumping the opacity down to 60%. Only took a few seconds and this way I could include them as a subtle element that didn’t interfere with my text.