Hello, Erin here again with a second installment about scrapping while on the road.

The last time I talked about scrapping on the road I shared hints I had learned to make it a bit easier, as well as what mistakes I struggled with and a few sample pages I have made so far.  You can check that post out here.

Today I want to share with you what I consider the “secret weapon” of scrapping on the go – APP Scrapping!

Now I have been told there are several apps you could use to scrap from your phone or tablet, but I am no expert on that and so I am going to leave the choosing of an App up to you.  I have been using the Project Life App, and since I am an Android user, I have only been using it for a few months (it only came out on Android a few months back).  There are already tutorials out there to teach you to use the app, so I won’t be covering that, but I do want to share my App Scrapping process, and what I have learned about making the process easier over the last few months – and especially the last few weeks. So, here is my process for setting up and carrying out app scrapping while we travel.

1. Prepare and organize

App Scrapping is meant to make the scrapping process more streamlined and simple. The most important factor in successful App Scrapping is being able to find you photos and cards easily.  If you go to make a page but can’t find your photos or the cards that you are wanting you do not get very far with the app. So organization and preparation are essential.  When preparing for a trip, or a dental visit even, I often think about what page(s) I might want to scrap and then load up cards and photos accordingly.  Now most of the time I just use photos that are already on my phone as that is easiest, but sometimes I want to use photos other people have sent me, or some pictures that were taken by my “real” camera.

I will be honest and say that the deal breaker to App Scrapping for me was being able to use cards I already have in my stash.  The App comes with some cards, and there are “in-App purchases” you can make, but I already had some awesome cards that I really wanted to use, so before I purchased the App I made sure it was possible to still use outside cards – and it is!  There are many different ways you can go about doing this – but most of them focus on loading your cards to an internet storage/sharing site, or directly to your phone.  As I mentioned, I am still new to this, so my method may not be the best, but it works for me, and right now while we are on the road that is all that matters.

I already have a Dropbox account for work, and I have my phone linked to that account so that I can easily upload my phone photos to my computer, so I decided the easiest way for me was to create a folder in my Dropbox account with the cards that I want to use in my app scrapping.

I already knew that the travel cards I had printed, while basic and fairly neutral, would not cover all the stops we were going to make, and I already had some ideas on what some of those stops would be, so during this prep time I went ahead and loaded some extra cards that I could possibly use to my Dropbox folder.  Online it lists them like this. . .

Also, I have found that as we go about our stops, I want to add both cards and pictures from time to time, so when I have an internet connection I take a minute to swap out cards in my Dropbox folder and in this way kept my folders up to date. My folders are constantly changing depending on where we have been and how much app time I might have.

2. Keep notes

Now as far as I know, loading outside cards as JPEGS makes it to where the App thinks those cards are photos, and as such I have not figured out a way to journal on those cards within the app (if you have figured that out please let me know!!) You can use other apps to journal on the JPEG before importing it, or you can wait and journal later.  I have been keeping notes in my calendar of the photos I have taken and what was going on, as well as including funny quotes from the kids, or thoughts I had, maybe a sign we saw, things like that.  This works for me because I am also doing that with my print and scrap pages and this way I have all my notes in the same place – color coded as to where the page is (app vs. print and scrap) – so that later I can make sense of my layout when I assemble my Book (if I find it LOL)

3. Make your pages

The beauty of App Scrapping is that you can make simple pocket pages quickly just about anywhere.  I made some while riding in the car between stops, while waiting on my children to use the restroom, while waiting at the airport, at restaurants and more.  Using the App you simply pull in pictures and cards from the designated folders and then save and export the pages as you desire.  I can often make 2 or 3 pages in about 20 minutes, even editing my photos as I go (if you use unfiltered photos or photos already edited it takes even less time).

The part that took me the longest to figure out was that I needed to import the cards the same way I imported my photos.  So when I chose what I am adding it is always photos (if you choose to import cards it will only take you to the PL App cards in the library.)

Here is a quick image of inside the app to show what I mean by that.

 

And here is a page I made.

Uses Friends Food and Fun

4. Finish your pages

This is where you have some room to express yourself. The App itself does not allow for adding .png elements to the page (or if it does I have not figured it out yet, lol).  So I have to decide if the page I made in the App is finished as it is, or needs a little additional work.  To be honest this was one of the factors that kept me from using the app more in my normal everyday scrapping – it seemed like too many steps if I was going to make a page in my normal style (which usually has quite a few elements added on top of the pictures and cards).  But for scrapping on the road, it is actually pretty perfect.  I can get the basics down on a good number of pages, and then go back and add more – or not – as I see fit later.

If you want to do all hybrid, then you can print your pages out before journaling and embellish them however you like.  That is what I did with these pages- I printed out the JPEG that the App exported to my Dropbox, then added my journaling.

Here is a look at the in-app original and the printed out version.

This first one I have done some journaling, but left the cards as one sheet so I don’t lose the pieces)

(original from app)

Uses Friends Food and Fun

This second one I went ahead and cut out the cards and added some simple embellishments just to show you.

(original from app)

Uses the Great Outdoors

If you are a digital scrapper, you can simply export your pages and then finish them up on your computer when you are finally finished traveling. This page I made for a separate book, one celebrating the 15 years my husband and I have been married. It is a purely digital book, so I went ahead and just finished it off in Photoshop – I added a background paper, some elements and journaling in just a few minutes.

(original from App)

(finished in Photoshop)

Uses the Great Outdoors

If you are a minimalist – well – you might just be done already!  The app pages can be printed as-is with a white background and you are ready to go.

Because I used a title card on this one, it really does not need much other than to be printed and cut out.

Uses the Great Outdoors

And that is just a real quick look at how App Scrapping can help you keep up with your Pocket pages while on the road.  Please feel free to share your App Scrapping experiences in the comments below!