Nine years worth of memories.

Pictures and stories filling albums to the brim.

A huge burden off her shoulders.

Check!

Title Pages for all 9 years + current 2013 albums

We love stories like this. Cathy in Florida has experienced something that so many others have. In fact, when Brandi from our team first saw this email she immediately perked up because this was so similar to her own experience of mass catching-up with the scrapbooking she tackled not too long ago.

In Cathy’s own words, this is her experience:

I was a traditional scrapbooker for over 10 years, but the I had to quit scrapbooking for 5 years due to life circumstances. When I came back to it last year, I had reconciled that I would never get caught up and I would just have to scrap my favorite photos. Then I found Project Life.

Last September, I purchased the Turquoise Edition and started sorting and printing photos. I am happy to tell you that in just five months, I completed nine years’ worth of albums that include almost 6,000 photos in between their covers and all those photos are off my computer and in those albums (2004-2012). I accomplished this using the Turquoise, Clementine, and Cherry physical editions along with the Seafoam and Wellington digital journaling cards.

I have four children and while my two older daughters (21 & 17) were so impressed that they both wanted Project Life albums of their own, I was most excited in watching my two younger sons (9 & 7) pour over the albums because they can finally look at all the photos of their lives that they haven’t really seen before!

I am now working in real time on 2013. I love this method of scrapbooking that is really more like a visual diary. Even my husband loves Project Life! Soon I will put all of his childhood photos in an album and he will journal the stories. Thank you so much for such a “do-able” system. It was the exact solution I was looking for to creatively and beautifully put my photos in albums without having to do full size layouts for every set of photos! My family and I could not be happier.

A few more notes from Cathy on how she did it:

I already had all of my photos in chronological order on my computer. I set up a separate Project Life folder to prevent any losses or permanent changes to my original photos. Within the Project Life folder, I created a folder for each year and within each of these folders, I created numbered folders for each Project Life spread. I chose photos from my chronological folders and copied them into my Project Life folders by groups of 10-14. Each Project Life spread has 16 pockets (8-4×6 & 8-3×4) If I did want more than 14 photos because it was a large event or something, I would add inserts. If I needed more journaling space, I chose fewer photos.

I determined which Photo Pocket Page styles were best for each spread and used Photoshop Elements to prepare the photos for printing by cropping them to the size they would be in the album. I kept in mind the second page of the prior spread because that would be the first page of the current spread. For the 3×4 photos, I would open a new 4×6 document in photoshop and place two 3×4 photos on one document, saving me money in the printing process by receiving two 3×4 prints for the price of one 4×6 print.

Everything was saved in the appropriate Project Life folder because I would order hundreds of photos at a time. I was then never confused about where a particular photo belonged when I received and sorted them. After sorting my pictures, I would then cut the prints with the two 3×4′s in half, corner punch all my photos and then place them in my photo pocket pages. I was then ready to add journaling and title cards.