Hi Erin here with a new pocket scrapbooking post!

I will be the first to admit that social media has changed my life.

You see, I live in Asia, but most of my family is in the United States.  It has been that way since 2004.  The first few years were hard.  My family kept on living and growing, and I could not be a part of it.  These days we stay connected with Facebook.  My family is pretty good at posting photos of what is going on in their lives, and I try to do the same.

I confess, I get really homesick some days.  The last few years I have started a “family and friends” scrapbook, where I make pages of what is going on in their lives.  I do this mostly as a way to feel connected to loved-ones that are so far away.

BUT, the major problem with this is the photo quality.  I am sure you know what I mean.  Pictures you grab off of Facebook or Twitter, even Instagram sometimes, don’t always have the quality you want.  Sometimes that is because the photographer has no idea what they are doing – hey we all have family members like that, he he – but often it is because these sites resize the photos.  When we save them to our computer and try to pull them into a layout they show up teeny tiny. Sure, you can make them bigger, but that could cause them to be grainy and unfocused, so be careful.

What I have started doing is using my social media photos on Pocket Pages. I can use a lot of photos, or just one – it does not matter really – and they don’t have to be very big to still look good on the page.

Here is a page I made of my cousin’s daughter.  (My maternal side of the family is VERY close). I have never met her because she was born last year while I was here in Thailand, but she reminds me so much of my cousin at this age.

(credits: Natural Beauty, Life Captured March Templates, Pea Emma font)

Between the photos and the videos my cousin posts I can see her personality blooming and I SO want to go home and see this little face.  Unfortunately, the photos were really tiny and grainy, and they still are a little, but by converting them all to sepia (so they looked good together on the LO) and putting the grainiest of the photos onto the smaller photo masks, I was able to pull off a page about this part of my homesickness.

Scrapping my family’s lives helps me cope, and when I pass the pages on to my family they LOVE it, so win-win right!

What about you? Do you use Social Media photos? Have you tried them on a pocket page?  If not, give it a try! Or if you have any more hints to help us out with using these photos please tell us in the comments below!

Happy Scrapping!