Photo Books vs. Scrapbooks

As a graphic designer, I have been smitten with the concept of photo books since they came out. I love the digital design aspect of them and the fact that you don't have to invest in tons of supplies and embellishments. I also love the emphasis on photos. While whimsical embellished scrapbook pages are beautiful, I love the clean crisp look a photo book offers.

However, I constantly find myself at an impasse of which events warrant being scrapbooked and which will be cherished better in a photo book. Beautiful photo books for annual family yearbooks and baby books make me want to create similar versions for our family. But I find my scrapbooking roots strike back with this innate tendency to save all sorts of random mementos. For instance, I left for our 6-week summer vacation with every intention of coming back and creating a beautiful Artifact Uprising book from all the photos.

In actuality, I came home with thousands of photos and 3 bags full of trinkets and papers from our trip. If I stick to my original plan what do I do with all those items?

The same holds true with our Memory Bank Shadow Box (pictured above after 10 months of collecting). The goal from the beginning was to then scrapbook everything we tossed in there during the year. I was unsure how I was going to do that, whether I would create a from scratch book or add each item to our Living, Growing Family Scrapbook in some semblance of order.

These were some of my indecisions before I found this amazing post via Pinterest.

This is possibly the most beautiful baby book I have ever seen. And I absolutely love how she combines various page protector sizes and tools to create it. This got me thinking that my current Project Life style of scrapbooking for our family book will work perfectly for the other things I want to chronicle: our trip book, Minion's baby book, and our memory bank.

I plan to just use the page divider sheets to stash the things I've saved over the year and slip those in chronological order in the Living, Growing Family Scrapbook just like the first page of Anna's Book.
For our trip album and baby book, I decided to go with 12x12 albums so that I can mix and match the page sizes. I went ahead and ordered this green faux leather book for Minion and this nice black one for our trip.

I also ordered the Becky Higgins 6x12 page protectors and the Project Life Photo Pocket Pages - Big Variety Pack. Add in the fact that I have more scrapbooking supplies on hand then I will ever be able to use and I think I can quickly and easily make two very beautiful scrapbooks. And this way I can still include all the little things I love to save that remind me of a specific place or time :)

I am so excited about this decision and feel like I am actually finally making progress when it comes to chronicling our summer vacation. While I still hope that one day I will have a reason to create an Artifact Uprising book, I know that these options will work best for the current projects I have.