It’s the holiday season again and you’re faced with what to give everyone. With tablets, laptops and Smart phones, everyone has already seen the images you’ve taken this past year. But what about great-grandma who may not have a tablet or the technical skills to use a laptop? Could you use a little creativity to share your images AND give her a gift she'll treasure at the same time?
With these tips, yes, you can.
As a freelance photojournalist, I am always looking for ways to get images into the hands of people that may not have the hi-tech toys needed view digital images. A few months ago, a friend sent this suggestion to me and I thought I'd pass it along.
Before you get busy making a photo album using the steps below, make sure you collect the digital images that you want to share. Don’t go overboard, somewhere between 12 and 24 will make a nice album.
Using free JPG to PDF software, convert the images you’ve selected into documents which can easily be printed on your home computer. It will be less expensive than taking them to a photo kiosk. Also, turning them into PDF files will help keep the quality of the images intact, something that can be hard to do with the JPG file format.
Now, get ready to design your own album. If you want to have a one-and-only album to share wonderful memories, this is an idea you'll print out and keep.
1. Gather the Materials
MATERIALS: You'll need a hole punch, 12 inches of ribbon, white glue, scissors, an Xacto type knife, scrap paper and cardboard squares at least as big as the dimensions of your finished album and, of course, the photographs.
2. Cut the paper to the same dimension as the cardboard backing. Make sure to leave 1” excess completely around the paper so that it can fold over and attach to the inside of your front and back cover.
In other words, if your finished album is to be 8x10, then you will need to cut two sheets of paper into sizes 9x11.
3. Cut different colored papers into the shape of a triangle that is a tiny-bit bigger than the corners of your photographs. These will allow the photographs to be “slotted” into the pages and will be glued to each album page.
4. Paste the triangles onto a backing sheet making sure the triangles are positioned to fit the four corners of an image.
5. Cover the cardboard pieces with the paper sheets you cut out in step 2. Centering your front or back cover in the middle of the paper, you will have 1/2 inch paper left around the edge of the cardboard. Fold this 1/2 inch over to the inside of the cover and glue it in place.
6. Design the cover and each of the pages one-at-a-time.
7. When you’re finished mounting the images using the triangles cut out in step 3, lay the back cover on the table, with the inside facing up. Stack the pages containing your images, face up, on top of the back cover. Lay the front cover, outside up, on top of the stack. In effect, what you are doing is “sandwiching” the pages with the images between your front and back cover.
8. Using the hole punch, punch three holes along one side of the stack.
9. Tie the stack together by threading ribbon sections through the holes. Finish them off with a creative knot.
Your photo album is done.
