For Christmas, I give my relatives a scrapbook featuring pages I made during the year. But as I looked through my galleries last December, I found something lacking. I had lots of pages featuring nice photos and trendy elements, but I was missing the stories. I was missing pages about holidays, the first day of school and birthday parties – the moments my family would want to see. I had to scramble at the last minute to scrap some of those events to make the deadline to order a hardcover book.

This year, I resolved to make the most out of my scrapping by getting more photos onto my pages. One of the most frequent things I’m asked in comments in my gallery is how I get all those photos on my pages. So today I’m going to share some of my secrets because it’s really not as hard as it looks!

TAKE LOTS OF PHOTOS: I’m sure that this is something most scrappers already do. I take my camera everywhere and try to take pictures of everyone and everything so I have lots of faces and details to scrap.

For this page, I took photos of everyone I saw at a fundraiser and also got some more photos from a friend. I then combined Hillary Heidelberg’s Project 365 February and March Templates to get more photos on the page.

ORGANIZE: I start my pages by going through my photos from an event and deciding which ones I want to include. I use the ACDsee program and put the photos into my image basket. If you don’t use an organizer program, you can save copies of all the photos to a new folder so you’ll have them all in one spot. I might have anywhere from three to forty-five photos in my basket to scrap. 

For these pages, I selected photos from a parade and some heritage photos to tell the story of my family’s history in the town. I also used some photos I found on the internet. I used a template for the page on the right to mix the past and present on my page.

HAVE A PLAN: My biggest trick in multi-photo and double-page layouts – I use templates. I stock up on templates that feature multiple photos – like Hillary’s Photo Overload 2 , WendyZine’s Lotsa Photos or Jen Caputo’s Sketch Collection 28. I really like double-page templates, but I’ll also combine templates or double the photos on an existing template to get more photos on there. Sometimes I rearrange blocks to add more photos or make photos bigger. If I can’t find one that fits my photos, I’ll sketch out my own template. (Keep reading to download one I made!) I find it’s a lot easier – and faster – to get all those photos on the page if you already have a plan. The great thing about templates is they give you a great start, but you can really make them your own.

To get more photos on this page, I duplicated the photo boxes on one of Hillary’s Photo Overload 5 templates and rotated them to create the cluster of photos at the bottom of the page.

GET SCRAPPING: I start my pages by placing all the photos on the template. Then I add backgrounds, elements, my title and journaling. I don’t usually add lots of embellies because I like to keep the focus on the photos. But I do like to place elements throughout to help guide the eyes across the page. Horizontal elements, arrows and repeated elements and colors really do the trick. I like to use frames or borders on my photos to make the photos look more unified or place a frame or a cluster of elements on a photo I really want to stand out.

On this page, I used a cluster of school supplies and the owl from Baers Garten’s Hello School to highlight the photo of my niece and her teacher at her kindergarten graduation.

SAVE: When I’m working on a two pager, I usually like to work on both pages in one document. But page files can be very large and really slow down my computer. I make sure to save often. You don’t want to lose all that work if your program should crash. As for saving my pages to post to galleries, I prefer to save my pages as one image so I can see the whole picture, but some people prefer to split them up. I say, do what works for you! I do, however, split my pages up when I save a flattened copy so that I’ll be able to print them.

I posted these Christmas Eve pages as separates because I thought each page could stand alone, where as my Project 365 page May (using Jen Caputo’s Project 365 Double Page templates) looks better as a whole.

GIVE IT A TRY: I never thought I’d be able to scrap double pages, but now I’m so used to it that most of my pages are doubles. All it takes is a little planning so why not give it a try. Here’s a template for you that I created to help get you started!