Newbie question: how many pictures to print?

[jjnv]

Hi,

I am working on a Disney scrapbook for my son's 10th birthday. We've been to disney 5 times with him so I got lots of pictures. I bought a Disney scrapbook kit from Costco. It has 20 12x12 pages. How many pictures should I print? What size?

I am going to try mpix.com. They charge flat shipping. I will try to get a good estimate before I upload too many.

Many thanks!

Jane

 

[Fran98765]

Wow, the impossible question!! Is the book you got expandable, meaning can you add more pages to that or are you "stuck" with the 20 pages? Instead of asking how many pics you need, I would do the following:

Go through your pictures and sort them in the order you may want them scrapped. If you have 20 pages, make an outline for each page, IE page 1 is an intro page, with 1 pic and pick the pic you want on that page. Page 2 will be XX ie your resort, and pick which pics you want of the resort or whatever you choose for page 2. If you do matching pages, make it pages 2 & 3 instead. Pick the pics and outline each page of your book. Then you will know what pics to print.

Generally, I would say more then 3 pics on a single page can get cluttered, especially if you have cute Disney paper and embellishments you want to use. If you crop your pics, you can do some lovely things with more pics. If you have larger pics, maybe some photopass pics or ride pics, you may want them to be on a single page.

 

[jjnv]

Thanks. The book can be expanded. I've not thought about page layout yet. I know that is the harder work. I went through pictures of past trips and picked over 100 pictures for each trip. When I started to upload, I released that I had a problem. Now I have to seriously cut down. Thanks for guide line.

 

[TPCShauna]

This is a really hard question. I typically average 3 photos per page uncropped and up to 6 (or sometimes more) cropped.

When I sort, I go through photos the first time and pick everything I'm drawn to. I then go through again and discard ones that are duplicates - like 2 pics of a parade float from slightly different angles. The next sort is taking out pics that have something wrong - a weird shadow or facial expression, not centered well, too many people in the background, etc.

I can usually cut 20% in the first sort, another 20% in the second sort and a further 10% in the third. The last sort happens when I am arranging the actual photos on the page when I realize something just doesn't fit into the layout or wasn't as good as I thought it was. I can typically cut out another 10% at this point so I find that I am actually only scrapping about 40% of the photos I take.

This works well for me but can be more difficult for some people. I just decided that there was no way I could scrap every photo I took or my books would have to be lifted by crane. I hope this info helps you. Good luck with your book!

 

[Spinning]

What I have started doing on albums that are repeat trips, or themes.... I first go through and make a file (copy the pictures over) that will be called print. Then I decide on how I want the book done. Pretty much I do a 2 page spread for each day and then if their is something special, like his birthday celebration that would be 2 pages.
I also have gotten into 5x7's. I love this size. I can do 2 on a page or 1 and then 2 smaller sizes cropped. I take the best for that. We usually always take a few pictures at the same spot each time. Those I do as 5x7.
I always over order. But I would rather have too many than not enough.