Let's Talk Storage....for your Digital Scrapbook Supplies

I've already written some blog post about how I store and organize my photographs using Google Photos, and about how I store and editable version of my finished Project Life pages on Dropbox.

Today I want to talk about storage of digital scrapbook supplies. These are the different digital papers, elements, alphabets, pocket cards, etc. that are available for purchase from places like The Digital Press, The Lily Pad, Pickleberry Pop, or any other of the bazillion or so design shops that are out there.

Typically when you buy digital supplies, you are given a download link and then you have to store the supplies you just bought somewhere. That place might just be on your desktop in a folder, or in Dropbox, or on an external hard drive. I'm not here to tell you which location is the best, or the most safe. I'm just hear to tell you what I've found to work for me.

Personally, I do have a folder on my desktop, but wanted a "cloud" location as well. I could use Dropbox, but I'm cheap and don't want to fork out the extra dough for more storage capability there. But I do have several Google accounts, and part of having a Google account is getting a gmail email address, and a host of other Google services, like Google Photos and Google Drive. Google Drive is what I want to talk about!

Google Drive gives you 15 GB of free (without having to pay to upgrade) storage with each Google account you create. (So, like I have four different Gmail email addresses--so that means I have four different Google Drive accounts--each with 15 GB of free storage!) That's a TON of space you can use for storing your digital scrapbook supplies, and it's in the cloud, so it's accessible and shareable from anywhere there's an internet connection!

It's really easy to set up folders (and sub-folders) to save your digital supplies. Here's how I do it.

First I purchase and download the supplies onto my computer. Then I open up Google Drive on the computer. If you have a Google account it's one of the options when you click on the "nine dots button" next to your account photo.

That will open the Google Drive window. From here, click on My Drive and under the down arrow are some options. Click New Folder to create a folder to store your supplies in.

Give the new folder a name. I tend to name the folders after the designer, knowing that I'm going to have further sub-folders that I will name after collections. But name them however makes sense to you!

Once you have created a main folder, you can click on the down arrow next to the folder name and create a New Folder with that one the same way you did above.

In this example, you can see I made a main folder called Digital Press (to represent the website I get kits from), then have a further sub-folder for the designer, Rachel Etrog, and then below that are the different sub-sub folders for the collections from that designer.

Once you have your folders and sub-folders created, double-click on the one you want to start adding your supplies into.

For this example I further created a collection sub-folder within the designer's folder (Twinkle Twinkle) and within that have separated the digital supplies into "elements", "journal cards", and "papers". I'm going to add items to the elements folder.

Now, all I have to do is drag and drop the files from my computer, into the middle of this opened folder.

The files will begin to download and appear within the folder. Depending on your internet connection, and how many files you are uploading, it can take a few minutes.

And that's it! Now you have your digital supplies stored in the cloud!

Stay tuned for the next blog post about how you can use some of these digital elements (pocket and journal cards, specifically) in the Project Life app---directly from Google Drive!

Part 2 - My Approach to Digital Scrapbooking - Starting from the Project Life App

In my last tutorial post, I talked about and showed the steps of how to take a photos from a Project Life app page and turn them into a digital page outside of the app, using Photopea.com. If you haven't read that post, click the link above and go read it first, and then come back to this one.

In this post I'm going to show you how I do a couple of more advanced things, like add drop shadows to my digital pages, for that extra little visual something.

For this page, I'm going to start off by placing some photos into pockets in the a Project Life app template, and leaving the rest of the pockets blank.

For this page I used template Design A in the PL app.

Then I export this page as is and save it to my phone's camera roll. It's okay that some of the pockets are blank, and you'll even get a warning message when you try to export, but just click Yes.

Those blank pockets will get auto-filled with your chosen page background color (in this case, white). So now I have this image to work with:

Take that image and save it somewhere where you can upload it to your computer. I use Dropbox, but whatever works for you. Once you have the page on your computer, you can begin to work to finish the page digitally.

Now that I've got everything on my computer,  I open up Photopea.com, and start a new project sized 3000 x 3000.

Once I have my 3000 x 3000 canvas to work on in Photopea, I drag my page onto the canvas.

I want to get rid of that white background, so that I'm just left with the photos as my layer. Look back at my last post for the steps to rasterizing the page, and then eliminating all that blank white space.

Next I want to bring into my project a background "paper". For this project, I'm actually going to use a white digital cardstock, that has a linen look to it. I add that to my project, so that now I have two layers visible in my Layers toolbar.

Remember that the item at the top of the Layers list, is the layer of your project that is "on top." So I  want my PL page with the photos to be on top of the white cardstock, so I made sure I drag the layers in that order.

So now that my "photos" are on top of the cardstock, I want to add a drop shadow, to give the whole page a sense of depth. To do that, I select the PL Page layer, and then at the bottom of the page, click the eff button (stands for Effects) and select Drop Shadow.

This will bring up a set of options to choose from when setting up your drop shadow. There are lots of options, and I don't know exactly what all of them do, but I'll show you what I know! (Remember I just stumbled across this process myself not too long ago, and have just been learning by trying things out!)

Drag this whole options box somewhere on the screen where you can see your page underneath, because as you change the options, you'll see those effects take place on your page and you can get an idea of how the change you make here will look on your page.

I have really only experimented with some of the options here in this section. I'll explain what they do.

Angle: This little circle icon with the small blue dot and the corresponding number in the black box represent where the "light" is coming from, which causes the drop shadow on your page. In this example, it's set at 30, which means that if your page was in the center of this circle, the light would be shining from the direction of the blue dot.  Try entering a number between 1-360 to try out shadows from different angles. It's a personal preference.

This is what the Angle set at 30 produces: a shadow on the left and bottom of the photos.

Distance - This lets you specify the distance your shadow will extend. The bigger the number, the longer the shadow stretches. Try changing this number and then watching your page underneath and how it changes. I tend to like just a subtle shadow, so I usually keep this number between 10-15.

Spread - From what I can tell, this adjusts how far the shadow spreads. I don't really mess with this one, and just leave this setting at 0%. But again, experiment, see what different number values do to your page.

Size - This one determines the size for the shadow. Again, I like a barely noticeable shadow, so keep this number 10 or less.

Once you like how these settings look, click OK to apply them to your layer. You will now see that in your Layers panel, you can see that this layer has effects applied. You can click the arrow next to eff and see a drop-down list of the effects you have applied.

Now here's what I think is cool. Once you've figured out how you want your drop shadows to look, you can save that layer style, and use it over and over again on the other elements you add to your page! If you add a button or a digital sticker to the page, it can have the same shadow effect as your photos! To save your layer effects, right-click the layer that has the drop shadow applied, and select Layer Style from the list that appears. Then click Copy.

Then add your next element to your page, and place it where you want. Then right click that layer in the Layers panel, choose Layer Style again, and click Paste. The drop shadow with the exact same settings will be applied, creating a uniform look to all your layers!

That's what I did her for the remaining elements I added to the page (the pennant banner, the YETI letters, and the baseball bat/ball digital stickers.

This page I actually put a piece of black digital cardstock under each of the photos, but still had the drop shadows applied.  But hopefully you can see how adding drop shadows adds a bit of depth to the whole thing.

Try it out and see how you like it!