How to Organize and Present Party Photos on Two-Page Scrapbook Layouts

Parties come in many flavors: big, small, birthday, holiday, theme, family, friend, community, planned, for a reason or just because.

Making party layouts that convey the spirit of the party, as well as who was there and what went on is immensely rewarding. You get a chance to relive the event, to think back over what really stood out, and to provide family and friends with a tangible remembrance of the event.

With any event for which you have a substantial number of photos, the challenge is to convey what went on without overwhelming and crowding the page. Here are three approaches for organizing photos in order to get lots of them onto two-page spreads.

1. Organize photos logically

One way to bring order to a page with many photos is to organize the shots into logically related groups–which may all go on one page or on several pages. Try these approaches:

• group photos by category within an event. Separate out portraits of the people, activities that went on, food, decorations, and whatever makes sense for your event.
• group photos by different activities within the event: On a trip to the beach, activities in that one outing could include: castle building, wave surfing, and sunning. At a neighborhood picnic, activities could include: tending the grill, games, mingling. At a birthday party, consider grouping by: party games, cake time, gift opening.
• group photos by time/stage. When scrapbooking Easter, you could group by: • coloring Easter eggs, the egg hunt, and dinner. For a wedding, you could group by: rehearsal dinner, getting dressed, the wedding, the party. Again, each subgroup could go onto its own page or it could fill its own area of a page.

2. Organize photos practically

Any time you can organize photos by common size or cropping potential (height, width, or total overall size), you can quickly get order on a page with many photos.

• photos of same height can be organized in a row
• photos of same width can be organized in a column
• photo of same size can make a block

Make groupings clear

You can establish that photos are related to each other logically with your design choices.

Location. Group related photos together in an obviously separate section of the page. In today’s layout there are 3 distinct sections or areas.

Common matting. Place related photos onto a shared mat. Another alternative is to free hand-draw or print a frame around the group.

Margins and gutters.Use common margins, same-sized gutters, and/or abutting edges to signal that photos are grouped together.

Size: As discussed in the previous section, cropping to same height, width, or • overall size can unite a group of photos.

Now it’s time to pull out photos from a party you’ve photographed and make logical and practical groupings that will enable you to pack them onto the page and still keep the story of the event clear.