One of the most common things I hear on scrapbook forums are questions asking about how to deal with with the large amount of travel photos. There are many different answers ranging from mini books to photo album scrapbooks, to single layout overviews of a holiday.
Personally, I enjoy my 8.5×11 inch scrapbook albums. I love making travel pages and I love looking back on them. I love the details, the overviews, and the stories. I don’t, however, make a plan as to how the album will be laid out. I tried that and I know it is not a process that works for me. Instead, I sort my photos by city, then subdivide that by site. From then, I scrapbook whatever calls to me.
Sometimes I’m perfectly happy to do a single or double page layout and create something totally unique. These are usually the layouts that get done first. Other times, I find myself with a mish-mash of photos that simply don’t work well design-wise. That’s when I turn to collages for my second page of a two page spread.
The idea is simple. I pull my feature photo(s) for the first page and work it like a single page layout. All the other remaining photos get cropped into a collage on the second page, in the same orientation as the first.
If I don’t have enough photos to fill an entire page, I can simply add in extra pattern paper or other decorative embellishment.
It is simple, easy, and effective. This scheme allows you to use many photos while still having fun with product and design. And more importantly, helps gets some of those harder to do layouts done and dusted.