Making Memories

Scrapbooks are a time-honored way to memorialize events in our lives. In them we can record memories, tell stories or record history, leaving a legacy for our children, family or even an organization. However, traditional paper scrapbooks are time-consuming, messy, expensive, don’t lend themselves to modern media like digital photos and video, and when you’re finished, you only have ONE of them.

So turn to digital scrapbooking. No glue splotches on the dining room table. Don’t need a home addition to accommodate the supplies, workspace and storage for finished books. Make copies for all your relatives, all over the world. Use the software and the digital embellishments over and over again. If other areas of life need attention, stop and save your work and go do something else. And your productions can include VIDEO. What a 21st century concept!

If you own a personal computer, a digital camera and/or a dv camcorder, most of what you need you already have. Round out your “supplies” with software, digital doodads and imaginative ideas and you’re all set. For example, with every new Macintosh sold, Apple includes an ideal digital scrapbooking environment, a suite of programs called iLife. iLife ‘08 is available for older Macs for $79. iLife’s superbly integrated programs include iPhoto and iTunes for managing and organizing digital images (including scans of photos or other objets d’art) and digital music, respectively. The iMovie component allows you to edit digital video and slide shows created using photos stored in iPhoto and music from iTunes. To complete your disc based project, iDVD outputs slide shows and movies to DVD. With iWeb you can create beautiful websites (without having to get your hands digitally dirty) with one-click publishing to a dotmac (.Mac) account. Garageband is a tool with which you create original music, loop-based soundtracks for your iMovie creations, or even podcasts. Several Mac applications stand out if your desire is to create a digital version of the traditional scrapbook, iRemember and iScrapbook both allow the user to create pages, based on templates with digital photos, and scans, journaling and embellishments. Both integrate closely with iPhoto. iPhoto itself has a feature that enables the user to create books which can be ordered in hard or soft cover or printed on your desktop printer. There is not much in the way of embellishment but some of its built-in book layouts do provide for adding text.

Windows users can substitute Picasa (free or $39 for more useful features) for photos, Windows Movie Maker (included with XP and Vista) for movie editing and in Vista, DVD maker to burn DVDs. Roxio’s MyDVD 9 or Adobe Premiere Elements are around $100 and work in Windows XP. iTunes is also available for Windows XP or Vista. There are a number of template-based website creation programs, including online offerings like googlepages, angelfire and geocities. Garageband’s loop-building ease-of-use is best approximated by a Windows program called Mixcraft. For more traditional scrapbooks, Windows software offerings include Scrapbook MAX!® and Photomix. The hitch with the piecemeal Windows approach is not the number and variety of software and embellishment choices but in its lack of integration between programs, but if Windows is where you’re at, you can still do the digital work.

Adobe Photoshop Elements, available for either Mac or Windows, does an admirable job adjusting the appearance of your photographs beyond the limited image editing capabilities of photomanagement programs like iPhoto or Picasa. With it you can easily eliminate red eye and improve the brightness, contrast, and cropping of photos that are not quite up-to-snuff.

The right software provides you with the tools with which to build a digital scrapbook, and now you need the building materials and most importantly, the creative juice. Do a quick Google search for “digital scrapbooking” and thousands of businesses will present innumerable offerings of digital tags, papers, buttons, flowers, templates and other doodads for traditional style scrapbooks or templates for websites or DVDs.

But the real point is the memorabilia – photos of your vacation, wrapping paper from a baby shower, tickets from the concert of a lifetime, video from the wedding – and the journaling that creates the story of your book. This is the meat of the project. This is the time to organize your photos, scan your paper items, edit your video, storyboard your production, pick your music, write your text or podcast narrative. This is what the scrapbooker lives for, and the digital scrapbooker is no different. The drive to record the history of our lives and the lives of our families, or for that matter our pets, is not changed by the motion and sound of video and audio, but the 21st century audience appreciates the multimedia enhanced product.