Scrapbooking at its essence is really about storytelling, but with a visual and tactile, rather than oral, focus. Scrapbooking is also a method for preserving a legacy or history in the form of photographs, printed media, and memorabillia contained in decorated albums, or scrapbooks. The tremendous growth of the Internet has resulted in more creative scrapbook approaches as well as online scrapbooks. The digital photography revolutions has been accompanied by an explosion in creative scrapbook ideas.

Scrapbooking starts when someone has a lot of pictures that he or she wants to organize in an eye-pleasing way. To do this, you can start creating pages on a whim and produce a random collection of photographs mounted on paper, or you can take the more effective approach and plan out a theme to your album. There are many album themes to consider when choosing the option that will best fit your needs.

The most often used theme for your album really isn't much of a theme at all-chronological order. Most beginning scrapbookers use this method of organization because it is convenient to use if you are trying to get all of your photographs out of boxes and into acid free albums. Chronological scrapbooks also make it easy to keep up with the album as you get new pictures developed. However, this is not the only type of album that can be created, and you should weigh all options before starting to scrapbook.

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There is no wrong way to scrapbook. Typically, the more creative and resourceful the person, the better the page. The main focus of each page should be the picture(s) or the letter or whatever is the most important to the creator. If you are interested in starting to digital scrapbook, or incorporate digital techniques with traditional scrapbooking, there are a myriad of Web resources available.

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Consider creating a birthday or holiday album, which work especially well for scrapbookers with children. Rather than including pages with all your pictures throughout the year, choose one holiday and start an album with one layout for each year. The result will be a book that shows the progression of a child from year to year, and these make excellent graduation gifts or can become keepsakes as your children move out of the house. These are on-going projects, so you will need to devote many years to an album before it is complete.

Another theme that makes a beautiful album is people. This works nicely with the random pictures you may have that were not used in your chronological album. To make this kind of album, create one layout for each person, and show them throughout the years. Alternatively, if you take many pictures, you can create a single album all for one person. An album themed by people makes a good gift for someone with many grandchildren or for someone moving away from a group of friends.

However you chose to theme your album, think of its function before you start. Who will be looking at the album? Are you giving this album as a gift? What kind of pictures do you have available? Scrapbooking according to theme creates well-organized albums, and by choosing a theme before you start creating pages you can make an album that works well in your collection or as a gift.