Photos, Photos, Photos!

Who, like me, takes a ton of photos on their phone? Well, I really want to scrap those photos that I take! So, with this post, I am hoping to share a few tips and tricks I have learned that help me get those pics edited, printed, and put in my albums...all right from my phone!

Step 1:

Take pics with your phone!  The best camera is the one near you. So use it!

I keep a shortcut on my iPhone so I can get the camera opened quickly. I slide my screen up from the bottom and  have my camera accessible instantly (see it on the bottom right?) When I get back from a trip, or hit 500 photos on my camera roll, I force myself to upload the photos to a hard drive and then delete as many as possible off my phone. 

Confession time: I always keep about 100 pics on my phone of my handsome hubby, cute kids, and adorable granddaughters, for, you know, BRAGGING purposes! But I delete the rest once they are backed up or my phone fills up quickly. :)

These are pics I took on a recent trip to Paris and Rome. 

Step 2:

Edit pics as you take them. I usually do this after a day of teaching or sightseeing when I'm curled up in bed and letting my achy feet rest!  It's fun to put your faves together in collages for Instagram or Facebook (like those shown above), or add fun filters and text on top of them (like the one shown below.) Save those edited pics to your camera roll so you can print them out later. So...how do you edit pics?

Photo & Editing Apps:

This article has an amazing run-down on their favorite photo apps for taking photos and editing. They include popular apps like Snapseed, procamera7, and pic, tap, go.  Of course if you ask 100 people what the best apps are you are going to get 100 different answers. (I just found another app that I HAVE to get-TimerCam! It's a timer for better selfies or group shots when you ALL want to be in the pic! And it's FREE!)

Now here are the ones I use! Haha. I love editing single pics with Rhonna Design or Design Studio. These give me a choice of adding text, frames, filters, etc. Rhonna is a fellow scrapper who does shabby-chic designs like no one else!

It allows the lazy side of me to "remix" other brilliant designs and apply them to my photos if I do not want to make my own! (Reminder-Save all edited photos to your camera roll so you can print them later!) I also LOVE Instagram's filters for photos! I haven't found a filter set I like better than theirs so help me out if there is one you like!

To keep photo editing easy I put all my photography apps in one file on my phone. Once I have edited my pics I use either PicStitch or PhotoCollage to put pics together so I can print them out and add them to my Insta-Scrap album. I like both, but they are different so use the one YOU like! Both are free. 

Tip: I'll show how to put a collage together in my class...so come watch it! 

When I need to print photos I pull out the page I am scrapping and look at the page configuration to see what size photos it requires: 4x4, 3x3, 2x2, 3x4, etc. I pick the pics for that page and use PicStitch to put them together in the correct sizes so I waste less photo paper. I find this the most logical way to print what I want and need!

Printing Tips:

Now that I have my pics edited and put together in nice formats I need to print them out.  I open my Canon Selphy app on my phone and send the edited pics straight to my Selphy CP900 printer using wifi. It is so SIMPLE! It takes about 40 seconds to print a 4x6 out. I only print what I want, when I want. The printer is about $80 and the paper/ink packs can be found for about $12.99 for 36 shots.  I think it's a great price for the comfort of printing at home.

Tip: you can also connect your camera directly to a Selphy and print from it...no need for a phone!

Don't want to print your pics at home? You can also upload your phone pics to Snapfish (my fave),  Walgreens, Adorama, Persnickety Prints (my other fave), Wal-Mart, and other photo-printing sites! They now have options for square pics, etc. See how everyone is adopting to the social media trends?

Other Tips:

What about scrapping pics not on your phone? I have found two easy ways to do this!

1. I email myself lower res shots (500 kb) of my fave photos from my Mac, or hard drives, so I can save them to my iphone and print out when I want. It is also a FAB back-up method for my pics! Just save those photo emails into their own folder so you don't delete them when you are cleaning out your email.

2. You can also use your smart phone to take "scans" of old, vintage pics! I didn't have a scanner and needed copies of a photo taken with *gasp* film. I took a shot of it with my phone and LOVED the results. The phone is so fast and easy that you can get copies of all of those old pics in just a short time! Upload them to your computer or hard drive and clean them off your phone. (And throw that scanner away!)