Displaying Your Photographs in Albums

The photographs of your own life present many options. This is where brainstorming and jotting down your ideas first produce some creative options for albums that will result in interesting albums that others will enjoy looking through. Here are a few ideas I have come up with:

*holiday albums- Christmas, birthdays, etc.

*starting with the picture of a house, the events that occurred there

*siblings' albums, and their families

*a vacation album (comprehensive, don't want to include the 100 from one trip, but a few from each)

These ideas are just a starting point. Remember my coffee table book analogy? I want to make my albums as interesting to share as those books are to look at.

When you are ready to start putting together your albums, choose ones of good archival quality. The life of the pictures in them can last almost as long as the one tucked away in more serious archival storage. They can become an important part of the family legacy that you pass on. Because they will be viewed, using archival plastic pages to protect the photographs from fingerprints is important.

Again, like a coffee table book, I want to include more than just photographs. More than just labeling pictures, I plan to include snippets of narrative. Copies of newspaper articles, birth and other records, awards, graphic family trees, and even locks of hair can enliven and decorate the pictures and narratives in your album. But remember, unlike the detailed genealogical files and notebooks you have, these are more focused and arranged to hold the interest of the viewer.

Finally, to provide the perfect embellishment to your album, use the tools that scrapbookers have at hand. My daughter-in-law introduced me to the new scrapbooking phenomena. It is not the scrapbooking of our childhood where we glued strange bits of things onto blank pages, but a more sophisticated and archival minded hobby now.

For ideas to get you started Heritage Scrapbooking- Artistic Choices has a series of three articles with some good tips.

For buying scrapbook supplies online, Wendy's Links- Scrapbook Company Reviews gives an excellent rating system.

NEXT WEEK: Displaying your photographs in frames

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