A scrapbooking history.
May. 18th, 2008 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elwenI discovered Scrapblog yesterday. It's a site that lets you create "multimedia scrapbooks" with your digital photos and videos. The page transitions make me think of them as glorified PowerPoint presentations, although the individual pages are dynamic only to the extent of clicking on embedded video links, I think.
Scrapbooking is one of those things with which I have had many occasional flings but to which I have never fully committed. Back in the paper-and-pencil days, I started making scrapbook pages out of photos I'd taken in Washington, D.C. I think what ultimately made me set it aside was the permanence of the changes I made. I'm a trial-and-error, control-z undo type of person. (Also, I just don't like using scissors and gluesticks that much.) But here I was cutting actual photos that I'd had to get developed at the drug store, and once I made a cut, I could never take it back. (It wasn't so bad with the D.C. photos because most of them were crappy anyway -- taken with little more than a toy camera on 110 film -- and I think I'd gotten them developed with duplicates -- goodness knows why.) The pages I started, with construction paper bushes against a blue sky, and a grey, grainy picture of the Washington Monument, is still in my closet somewhere, probably, along with a binder I should scavenge and many more pages of pristine, though now probably somewhat yellowed, scrapbooking paper.
After high school, I started playing with this shareware program called DigiAlbum or something like that. I gathered together all the pictures from the Japan Bowl trip and started weaving it into some kind of story. I still have it, as an executable file with the DigiAlbum viewer built in. Looking at it now, it's ridiculously primitive. All the photos were scanned in -- we were still in the pre-digital days, apparently -- and some were badly touched up by yours truly. The copywriting was pretty pathetic, too. And the presentation was just lacking. Comparing it to Scrapblog, I think the thing I was missing was rotation. As you'll see, I can't resist skewed text and pictures.
So that was my last fling with scrapbooking. With the same software, I'd started making a daytrips album, of various places my dad would take us on weekends, like the tide pools in Santa Cruz. I never compiled it, and I'm not really inclined to resurrect the software on my new computer, so it'll just have to stay as a bunch of working files in the backup of my old laptop's hard drive. (Here's a hint of how primitive this software was: the working files consist of jpeg thumbnails of each page, a proliferation of .dat and .~pa files (whatever that is), and a separate rtf file for every single text blurb I included. The photos themselves are absent -- I guess I chose not to import them into the working directory.)
That brings us to Scrapblog, which I started playing with last night. (And if my sleep schedule is still screwed up when I wake up for work tomorrow, it will be why.) I figured that since I never ended up posting about Mexico, because I spent all of January whining instead, I should gather up my pictures and give the site a try. Photography-wise, Mexico was a lot less exciting than Hawaii, but I think the scrapbook turned out pretty well. [I'll post it in its own entry after this, just to separate it from this flood of text.]
In sum, they make it very easy to make things look great. It took me about two hours to make my first three pages, but after I got the hang of it, things go pretty quickly. The themes are seriously a godsend.
The one major turnoff for me was that their borders extend inwards from the edge of the image rather than outward. That means the thicker your border, the more of the image you are obscuring. Given that there's a crop function, I don't see why they wouldn't have the border extend out. I guess it's so you can adjust the border thickness without the size of the image changing, which might screw up your careful placement of things.
There are some other minor things that bug me -- like the fact that even if you set the border to 0, images still have thin border, which can screw up use of sticker borders -- but overall I'm impressed. Scrapblog is truly an exemplar of Web 2.0. If you enjoy any kind of graphic-y endeavors (web design, Winamp skinning, etc.), you should give it a try.
Scrapbooking is one of those things with which I have had many occasional flings but to which I have never fully committed. Back in the paper-and-pencil days, I started making scrapbook pages out of photos I'd taken in Washington, D.C. I think what ultimately made me set it aside was the permanence of the changes I made. I'm a trial-and-error, control-z undo type of person. (Also, I just don't like using scissors and gluesticks that much.) But here I was cutting actual photos that I'd had to get developed at the drug store, and once I made a cut, I could never take it back. (It wasn't so bad with the D.C. photos because most of them were crappy anyway -- taken with little more than a toy camera on 110 film -- and I think I'd gotten them developed with duplicates -- goodness knows why.) The pages I started, with construction paper bushes against a blue sky, and a grey, grainy picture of the Washington Monument, is still in my closet somewhere, probably, along with a binder I should scavenge and many more pages of pristine, though now probably somewhat yellowed, scrapbooking paper.
After high school, I started playing with this shareware program called DigiAlbum or something like that. I gathered together all the pictures from the Japan Bowl trip and started weaving it into some kind of story. I still have it, as an executable file with the DigiAlbum viewer built in. Looking at it now, it's ridiculously primitive. All the photos were scanned in -- we were still in the pre-digital days, apparently -- and some were badly touched up by yours truly. The copywriting was pretty pathetic, too. And the presentation was just lacking. Comparing it to Scrapblog, I think the thing I was missing was rotation. As you'll see, I can't resist skewed text and pictures.
So that was my last fling with scrapbooking. With the same software, I'd started making a daytrips album, of various places my dad would take us on weekends, like the tide pools in Santa Cruz. I never compiled it, and I'm not really inclined to resurrect the software on my new computer, so it'll just have to stay as a bunch of working files in the backup of my old laptop's hard drive. (Here's a hint of how primitive this software was: the working files consist of jpeg thumbnails of each page, a proliferation of .dat and .~pa files (whatever that is), and a separate rtf file for every single text blurb I included. The photos themselves are absent -- I guess I chose not to import them into the working directory.)
That brings us to Scrapblog, which I started playing with last night. (And if my sleep schedule is still screwed up when I wake up for work tomorrow, it will be why.) I figured that since I never ended up posting about Mexico, because I spent all of January whining instead, I should gather up my pictures and give the site a try. Photography-wise, Mexico was a lot less exciting than Hawaii, but I think the scrapbook turned out pretty well. [I'll post it in its own entry after this, just to separate it from this flood of text.]
A Mini-Review of Scrapblog.com
Scrapblog is really, really addictive. All editing is done in a big flash applet, whose interface is pretty similar to PowerPoint. Scrapblog provides a lot of themes, which are collections of backgrounds, frames, and "stickers", which are basically clipart. Each theme also comes with a few pre-made pages, which are good for inspiration or cannibalization. Editing basically proceeds by drag-and-drop. The interface makes it very easy to achieve certain common effects: drop shadows, circular and star-shapped cropping, image borders, rotated elements. It's really very well-designed for the scrapbooking application. In addition, the thing ran very fast and stably on my computer, though I assume it's quite bandwith-heavy.In sum, they make it very easy to make things look great. It took me about two hours to make my first three pages, but after I got the hang of it, things go pretty quickly. The themes are seriously a godsend.
The one major turnoff for me was that their borders extend inwards from the edge of the image rather than outward. That means the thicker your border, the more of the image you are obscuring. Given that there's a crop function, I don't see why they wouldn't have the border extend out. I guess it's so you can adjust the border thickness without the size of the image changing, which might screw up your careful placement of things.
There are some other minor things that bug me -- like the fact that even if you set the border to 0, images still have thin border, which can screw up use of sticker borders -- but overall I'm impressed. Scrapblog is truly an exemplar of Web 2.0. If you enjoy any kind of graphic-y endeavors (web design, Winamp skinning, etc.), you should give it a try.
