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!