Sharing Digital Organization Plans: Shawna’s System

We thought it would be helpful to share how others in the digital community are organizing their digital images.

In this guest post, Shawna at Shawna Scraps and Creative Team Member extrodinaire, shares her digital photo organization system.

If you don’t know Shawna, let me tell you that she takes a LOT of photos! She loves to use My Memories Suite to create her digital pages and is on 6 (I know, SIX!) Creative Teams: Jumpstart Designs, Lindsay Jane, Pickleberrypop, Scraps-N-Pieces, SugarBeans Designs and Wendy Tunison Designs.

“How do I organize my digital photos? I get asked this question all the time. As a mother of 4 kids I take a LOT of photos. I will admit that I am never caught up on having my photos printed and for this reason it is important for me to store my photos safely and in an organized fashion. There are many ways to organize your digital photos and not every method works for every person, this is just what works best for me.
First I organize my photos by year. Here you can see the main folders categorized by year.

Inside the main *year* folder, I have sub-folders with each month separate. Here inside the 2011 folder you can see that I have each month in its own folder.

Now peeking inside the February Folder you will see that I have each day and/or event separated into yet another sub-folder.

This not only lets me find my pictures fast and easy, but also helps me keep track of which pictures I have printed, and which ones are next on the list. For example, it is easy for me to look inside my family album and see that I have printed the pictures from the February 5th album, but have not printed any since then. I now know that my next set of prints should be from the February 10th album! Easy Peasy!

To keep my memories safe I store all of my photos on not one, but TWO external hard drives in addition to on my computer. No matter how it is you organize YOUR photos, the most important thing is that it works for YOU.”

You can read more about what Shawna is up to and find links to all of her CT Galleries at her blog Shawna Scraps.  Be sure to check out her galleries because she makes some amazing pages that you will definitely want to “scrap lift”.  Thanks Shawna!

{We’d love to hear how YOU organize your digital images.  Email us at info@thememoryboutique.net to be featured on our Blog!}

Install A Museum Wall-Art Hanging System

I think you know me well enough by now to know that once I get a thought in my head, I obsess about it!  I have a huge blank wall in my house (a canvas if you will) and I’m forever trying to figure out a way to display something on it.  Perhaps I’ve found it!  I love how museums hang their art and now I can hang my art the same way!  Check out the idea from HGTV:

Think a gal can pull this off without “male electrical” assistance?  I’m going to try this in July…I’ll let you know if I can do it or if I have to call my dad (a.k.a. “electrician extraordinaire”!) AND I’ll post some pics of the outcome.  Remember, “Photographs aren’t photographs if they’re sitting in a drawer.”  ~ National Geographic.

Have fun displaying your wonderful memories!  ~ Jackie

Special Wordles for Scrapbook and Journal Pages

The MyMemories posts are going to fly all over the board here in regards to topics (sorry!), but my husband showed me this website via an email months ago and I JUST started playing with it after Lisa J. from MyMemories started posting about it, too. I’m excited about this one!  It’s called Wordle. It’s FUN, simple and easy to use!  Type in words, press “Create” and it places the words in a creative “word cloud”.  How cool is that?  It even allows you to place a web address into a link, pulls wording from that site and creates a word cloud.  I tried it with The Memory Boutique and look what it created:

Is that awesome?  Can you see these in your scrapbooks as front covers for special albums like family vacations, reunions or whatever? And how about journals? Title a journal entry and think of words for that topic. Simply type in all the words you can think of, press create and see the word cloud it creates for you in less than a second.

Select “Open in Window” and this is where you’ll have the option to change the font, layout, choose different color themes, etc.  Just play around with it to get the cloud you like!  I created another word cloud for our family trip to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg.  I had my kids sit down and tell me all the words they could think of from looking through the album’s pages and this is what they came up with:

Once your word cloud is complete, copy the image and save as a JPEG (I only use Macs so if you’re a Mac user, use the Grab tool to capture the image; PCs?  Sorry – I imagine you can right-click on the image and save it or even print screen, pull it in your preferred program for cropping and save there). When you’re creating albums in MMS, simply navigate to where you have the word cloud images saved and pull it in.  Easy peasy and fun (and a lot less work than trying to create a gazillion text boxes to create one of these babies on your own)! Be sure to check out Wordle and have fun with all the new “word clouds”!

Interested in purchasing MMS?  Click here and be sure to use the code STMMMS35304 to receive a $10 discount for the software and $10 discount for the MMS Design Shoppe!

~ Jackie

Decorating Ideas for Family Pictures

I admit it.  I lack decorating skills and I need help.  Having an amazing camera and beginning to take amazing pictures, I want to start displaying my family pictures on my walls, but what is an inexperienced decorator to do?  Shoot on over to HGTV and get some ideas!

I love the black and white pics (because we can easily turn our digital images from colored to black and white with the click of a button!), but I also like the ideas for “no nails used” decorating, too.

Be sure to get your family pictures printed, framed and displayed because, “Photographs aren’t photographs if they’re sitting in a drawer.”  ~ National Geographic.

Enjoy those family pictures!

~ Jackie

My Memories Suite V3 Digital Scrapbooking Software