Personally, I enjoy scrapbooking so much I would replace all my photo albums with scrapbooks.

I scrapbook everything. If your books are all in chronological order - the organizing step is already completed! How lucky!

Casey, I know how you feel (although I am not as organized as you and my photos are not all in albums). I've really only started scraping and love it. Once you get started, you may feel that you would rather have everything in a scrapbook. You don't have to crop everything (although I seem to be a big cropper...probably cause I take lousy photos) and can use the entire photo in your scrapebook. Do you have duplicates of (or the negatives for) your photos? I have an old habit of getting dups of all my photos so I wouldn't have to worry about "give aways." If you don't have dups, just the negatives, once you decide which photos you want to scrape you can have duplicates made and use those in your scrapbook. This way you can have the best of both worlds and not worry about it! I still cringe everythime I crop, but I generally have dups and if not, I have one made. It costs to have them made but I feel better knowing I have a copy of the "whole photo" somewhere..even if it's not in an album. Sorry this is so long...hope it helps. Karen

If you have special photos you want in both places, I'd get a bunch together and have them color-copied. The color copiers at places like Kinko's are very good now, and you can get 3 or 4 photos to a page--very cost effective! A friend is doing a heritage album, and has used this heavily; it looks great.

I agree about color copying- for my wedding album, I wanted to include pictures of us dating. Office Depot makes color copies for .89 a page, and I could fit six pictures on a page. For less than three dollars, I had all the copies I needed for my wedding scrapbook!

I am thinking about trying to do a scrapbook, but I feel much like Casey and don't want to rob my photo albums! I was glad to hear about the option of getting color copies made at a place like Office Depot, etc. Can you tell me if it is self service, or do they do it for you/help you?

If you have your photos in magnetic albums, you should get them out immediately. They will deteriorate terribly. I would put all my photos in archival, acid-free albums if I were you. If you don't want to work yourself to death making highly ornate, Creating Keepsakes style pages, then just use the scrapbook as a photo album, with a minimum of journaling and few or no embellishments. They will be safer that way.

What Carla said. I had the magnetic page albums, and the pages were aging to a butt-ugly yellow-brown, and the glue was drying up which caused the photos to come loose. Not to mention the damage that can be done by keeping them in there.

I'm in the midst of moving from albums to scrapbook. I'm doing it a lot simpler than most, but the photos will be nicely preserved and that's the main thing. I'm also doing them in chronological order.

My "scrapbooks" are essentially photo albums done well! You can just combine the concepts and use a little journaling, cropping, background paper, etc to do a very tasteful and not-to-time-consuming "scrapbook" that is light years beyond an ordinary photo album. It's not so overwhelming as thinking about totally redoing everything.

Carla is absolutely right.

I am in the midst of trying to put together a Memory Album for a family reunion. Most of the pictures of my Mom an Dad are in an album with the magnetic pages. Most of them are stuck to the page and I am unable to get them out. If anyone has any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks