Storytelling with Photo Collages

If a picture is worth a thousand words, think of what can be conveyed with a photo collage?

I love scrapbooking events with many photos by using a photo collage.  Collages tell a complete story.  It can be a sequence of events.  It can be a series of photos of the same people doing different things.  It can be some photos to summarize a trip or an event.  It can be a series of photos of the same person/people over a period of time.  The possibilities are endless.  And it kills several birds with one stone, so to speak.  When I make a photo collage with some journaling, it makes me feel like the complete story is told.  It solves the problem of having too many photos, and it alleviates scrapbooking guilt.

 

In my own Project Life album, I love to make Month-In-Review photo collages like this one.  It summarizes a whole month of activities, with bullet point journaling underneath, front and back.  It is definitely a time-saver if you don’t have a lot of time for scrapbooking and memory-keeping.

 

In this example, I wanted to show the process of making our first homemade ice cream.  I had a lot of photos, so a collage helped me to fit all my photos into my page.

 

Here are some examples of storytelling through photo collages from The Lilypad gallery. {Click on the image to see in the gallery.}

Love how Becky used photo collages in these next two layout to tell the story of her family, one month at a time!

 

A Project Life page from Heather with photo collages.

 

And a page from Debra featuring photo collages to tell the story.  LOVE the different shots of her with members of her family!  So fun!

 

There are many different ways to make collages.  Here are some of them:

• Use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.  You can make your own template, or you can purchase pre-made ones from The Lilypad, like these from Designs by Lili.
• Use Adobe Lightroom’s Print Module.  This is my preferred method since I also process and organize my photos inside Lightroom.
• Use Picasa.  It’s free to download and it makes various collages of different configurations.  I found this handy tutorial on how to make photo collages in Picasa from Skip To My Lou.
• Use Big Huge Labs Mosaic Maker – it’s free, and check out their other cool photo tools too.
• Use various apps on the iPhone, iPod, or Android phones.  There are many that combine photos to make collages.  Just search "photo collage” in the app store.

 

I hope this post gave you some examples and inspiration for using photo collages in scrapbooking and telling your stories!  🙂

 

Christine (listgirl)