by Sunday Lamdin

In this age of digital cameras we have the facility to take multiple photographs of a subject… and frequently do! We no longer have to worry about the cost of processing a film and I for one, take lots of photos, meaning to delete most of them, just keeping the few best ones!

Doesn’t happen like that though does it?! I take loads of photos… I look through them and make the obvious deletions like blurred shots. But then I realise I have taken the equivalent of what we used to call a “whole reel” of film and actually I want to keep them all!

You know… the ones where somebody is pulling a funny face, or a natural pose that is slightly out of shot. You end up with lots of similar photos, but just slightly different enough to want to keep them all.

Well, you can’t print every one and scrapbook them all! Even if you were willing to create that many pages - they would make a rather boring scrapbook album wouldn’t they?

Well the very reason for your huge number of photographs (ie they were created digitally), can actually be a benefit … you have the capacity to print out these numerous photos in whatever size you like!

Now I am assuming you have, or have access to, a printer of some sort, but you can very easily print a larger picture of the one you like most from a set of photographs and then print a series of smaller ones.

This is what I did for the scrapbooking layout “You & Me” above. And it is the easiest way to achieve multiple pictures on a page, ie a straight strip of 3-4 pictures, sometimes referred to as a “border of pictures”.

To get some idea of the size of the pictures I need for my 8x8 layout, I open up my word processing package – in my case ‘Word’ -  and using the line draw tool, I draw a line across my page (which by default is A4 size) to show the 8x8 approximate length of the page (see above picture - also see the end of this article for the technical details as to how to do this accurately).

I draw this line instead of changing the size of the paper to 8x8 – you’ll see why in a moment!. I place the pictures onto the page to see how big they are in comparison to the 8x8 size and reduce/crop them till I am happy.

Then, because my piece of paper is still A4, I can just delete my line and tighten up my photos to the top of the A4 sheet. I can then place any other pictures which I would also like to print on the bottom of the sheet to fill it, thus making full use of an A4 sheet of photo paper without wasting any (or very little anyway).

With a little more experience (and I can show you this Know How too in future articles) I can drag and drop my sized pictures onto a piece of A5 paper onscreen (half A4) and print them out on half a sheet of photo paper, this saves me having to sort other photographs out at the same time.

Below is a screen shot of 5 photographs as printed from Word on an A5 sheet, and below that is the finished 8x8 scrapbooking layout using these 5 photos.

(This layout is also featured in a video showing how to put white text on a photograph before printing. It also shows breifly how to resize your pictures in Word too, although a future video will cover this in more detail). Click this link for more information.

For an article specifically about resizing and printing photographs in Word see This Article.