Scrapping My Blog

Since we found out that you can print wallet size photos at Sam's Club for 17cents per print (and you get two of each photo!) we decided recently to print out my blog. I keep the photos for my blog organized on my computer by month which is slightly different than my main photos which are organized down to the day.

I've got my main photos (In a file called "My Pictures") divided by year like "2007 photos" and then that has sub categories divided by month like "October Photos 2007", and those also each have subfolders labeled by date with a brief description like "Oct 7th Date Night and Church". I've got a separate folder for blog pictures divided with the same categories and subfolders just labeled as "Blog Pics 2007", with a subfolder of "October Blog Pics 2007".

So when I download my photos from my camera they go straight to the appropriate month and year and I create a new folder for that day to put them in. Then I look through them on my computer and pick my favorites which I immediately open up using my Paint program. There I resize and crop them, then save them in the blog pics folder under the appropriate month with a discriptive name like "Dan Jess date night Applebees".

Now, I've said all that so that if you aren't organizing your digital photos well right now, you can copy my plan. Also, because what I did was just grab all the blog pics out of every folder for the past two years and burn them to a CD in order by month. Then I printed out the first 60 of them at Sam's in wallet size. Then at home I used MS Word to create text boxes and just copied and pasted directly from my blog. I went through and deleted any specific internet links and references (like "Click Here" to see this website, etc.). Then I printed it out with two posts per page on white cardstock and scrapbooked the photos directly around the journaling.

The photos cost me about $10 to print. I have approximately 980 photos on the CD that have been posted over the last 2 1/2 years of blogging. I won't print every photo, just one or two from each blog post that relates to our family. We figure it should cost about $150 to print all the photos we want to scrapbook from the blog. AND we'll have a double of each photo to use for other projects or send to family. It takes me about 10 minutes per page to do a layout, so it should take about 75 hours to scrapbook all 2 1/2 years worth of our life (as documented by this blog) which, at 3 hours a day would take me 25 days. The trick will be setting aside the time to get it done.