Kids take a lot of work. They are pretty time consuming, particularly in the early years and before you know it, you have two or three of them and they’re heading off to school. When you finally have time to sit down and organize your photos, you realize that there are 5+ years and hundreds, if not thousands of adorable pictures on your hard drive and you have no clue where to start!

Fortunately, digital scrapbooking is the perfect way to start dealing with those pictures. The trick is not to let yourself get overwhelmed. Let’s take a look at how you can quickly sort those photos out and get started with the fun stuff, scrapbooking!

Step One: Pick a Starting Point

There is NO reason to start chronologically or try to scrapbook our child’s entire life in one session. Start small. Take a quick look through what you have and pick a starting point. I’d suggest going with a birthday, a short vacation or perhaps a special recital or something. This will give you the immediate satisfaction of getting some scrapping done, without taking days to slog through it all.

As you do this, if your photos aren’t already sorted, make sure you do that. Put them into folders that are labeled as you go . . . “Clayton’s 3rd Birthday”, “2008 Disney Trip”, etc. This will make them easier to find in the future.

Step Two: Crop and Adorn

If you’re like me, you have probably collected a lot of digital scrapbooking things over the years, so finding something that will work for your scrapbook pages shouldn’t be a big deal. Otherwise, once you know what you’re going to be scrapping, find a kit to download. This will contain everything you need from fonts and papers to stickers and ribbons that will set off your baby’s photos just so.

Don’t worry about journaling in the beginning if it’s not flowing. Just get the photos situated on the page, decorate it and move on to the next one. You can always come back and often journaling is the part where we get stuck . . . the idea here is to keep moving.

Step Three: Rinse and Repeat

Keep picking through the special events of your children’s lives and you’ll soon have scrapbook pages for the biggest moments. Then you can start looking at other themes, such as “Summer Days” or “New Baby Brother”, etc. Using a theme for each scrapbook page will make it easy to find photos to go with it and you will move a lot faster.

I find it is easier to set aside small amounts of time to do scrapbooking, rather than sit down and work on it all at once. However, you’ll figure out pretty quickly which is easiest for you! Be consistent, whether you choose to work for five hours each Saturday on scrapbooking or just 30 minutes a day . . . this will help you get through all the photos that have piled up for years. Don’t worry if it takes a while, depending on how camera happy you are, you will likely have a few months of work ahead of you!

Digital scrapbooking is fun and is something you can do easily on your computer as you are working on sorting out your photos. Rather than just sorting them all and then getting started on the actual scrapbooking, you will probably find it more rewarding to scrapbook as you go.

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