Planning Your Pages Part 1

First, lets talk about photo storage.  You downloaded them from your computer.  Now what?  Having the advantage of once being a "PC" I can tell you how I stored my photos with a PC.  But let's get to that in a bit.  I use a Mac now, so basically I put my SD card in the slot and my photos directly load into iPhoto.  They are beautifully organized and arranged by date, event, person, and place.

 
When I had a PC, I would download the picture from my camera and store them by date in My Pictures.  So, for example I would say this download is from pictures I took on August 28 to Sept 12, 2009.  I would create a folder named that at drag all of the photos into it.  And to consolidate later, I would arrange them by year so all 2005 photos would be dragged into the 2005 folder, etc.  

I had to manually move the files over and create folders for them.  And that is not a big deal, I just wanted to show you that way too as most of you probably have a PC. 

Okay, so now let's move onto how I plan my pages.  You will need two things.  At least I need these two things.  One is my notebook, and the other is Photoshop Elements.  Elements is available for free trial from Adobe.  I have an older version, and it works for me as I do most of my photo editing in Photoshop CS5.  Elements is easy to start out with and navigate.  I use it to create photo collages...which I still haven't figured out how to do in Photo Shop.  Elements is also very affordable.  I think its around $100 or so.  I would really encourage you to download the free trial and see how you like it.  And I can help you get started with any questions you may have.

Next, my Notebook.  My notebook is CRUCIAL to my planning.  In fact, once I thought I lost it and I almost had a real, actual heart attack.  (just kidding but it was close).  I keep all of my sketches and page plans in there.  I am going to talk about it in my next post because there is just a lot of stuff to go over.  I will try to get that up tomorrow.