In addition to the traditional art of scrapbooking, we now have another option to create beautiful layouts and preserve memories. With the added options of sound and moving images, digital scrapbooking is becoming very popular. A scrapbook, created on the computer using digital images, can be saved, printed, shared on blogs and email, and burned to a DVD.
Here is an overview of some websites that allow free digital scrapbooking:
Smilebox.com
Users can create and personalize scrapbooks for free using Smilebox. Sharing your scrapbook is free as well. In order to print, burn to a DVD or eliminate advertisements, a premium membership is required. Since I am new to digital scrapbooking and still love the traditional books, I’m trying out the free features. It seems fine for what I want at this time.
StoryTellers Digital eXpress
The free account offered by StoryTellers gives users 100 download points and over 2,000 products. Additional membership levels are available. This site claims to be the “No. 1 site for digital scrapbooking.” It offers several methods for downloading templates and completing layouts.
Free Digital Scrapbooking.com
The site at www.freedigitalscrapbooking.com provides digital freebies and offers information and tutorials to get started with digital scrapbooking. You are given the option to join their free scrapbooking club and to receive their monthly newsletter. What I like about this site is the ability to download different scrapbooking alphabets for free.
There are several options for digital scrapbooking. The advantages of this method include ease and convenience of designing and creating scrapbooks and being able to put them on DVDs.
If a traditional scrapbook is lost or damaged, it may be gone forever. A digital scrapbook can be burned to DVD, backed up on hard drives and flash drives, and printed into hard copies.
While you lose the embellishments and craftiness of traditional scrapbook layouts, digital layouts are just as creative and fun. In addition, digital is easier to work with and can be done without dragging out a bunch of supplies that are often used in traditional scrapbooking.
I’ve come to appreciate digital scrapbooking for the convenience it offers. With my three-year-old always in the middle of what I am doing, I have not found much time in which I can bring out all of my scrapbooking supplies and create traditional layouts.
Being able to start a digital layout and simply leave it when I need to do something else means that I have more time to actually complete layouts and finalize my scrapbooks. While I am still planning to return to traditional scrapbooking when I can, there is definitely a place in my schedule for digital scrapbooking.
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