From Foothills to Fog: Project Life Scrapbook

One of my goals for 2016 was to be better at documenting our life and all of the fun adventures we have together. The blog has been a great tool for documenting things, but I love having a tangible scrapbook that we can pick up and look through from time to time. I take so many photos both with my phone and camera, but I feel like they just get lost in a folder on my computer instead of on display in our house or in an album where we can enjoy them.

I've gone through periods of my life when I am really good at documenting things and keep up with scrapbooking. You may also remember I have made scrapbooks for my friends as a gift to them at their bachelorette party. It's a fun tradition that I benefited from as well, because my friends made an amazing album for me too! And in college, my roommate and I would spend hours watching movies and working on our scrapbooks. Because of that, I have a few albums of my college years as well as my first trip to Italy studying abroad. I have often picked those up to flip through them and reminisce on what a fun experience that was. Funny enough, one of the scrapbooks my college roommate made, was a graduation gift for her friend Andrew. You guessed it, the same Andrew who is now my husband :) so funny how life works out! It's so fun now to look through that and see so many pictures of myself, even though we weren't dating or even that close of friends.

I have also done smaller scrapbooks of our trips to Tuolumne Meadows as well as our Cabo vacation in 2013. But, I don't have complete yearbooks for the time Andrew and I have been together, which makes me sad. So, my goal for 2016 was to keep up with documenting our lives each month throughout the year, so at the end of the year I could purchase a complete book. Since so many photos are often on my phone, I discovered an app called Project Life that I thought I would try.

Although I do have some complaints about the Project Life app, there is a lot that I love about it. The concept of Project Life was to make scrapbooking easier and more affordable. Scrapbooking can easily become quite costly with all the stickers, paper, albums, tools, etc. that it requires. In addition to the cost, they are so time consuming to create. Project Life created pockets with cute "filler cards" so you could just print pictures and slip them into pockets. Then, use the "filler cards" for journaling and to add color & style. I don't usually print my pictures, and I already had so many things for traditional scrapbooking, I had never used their products. But then they created the Project Life app that follows the same concept. You can buy different kits for your filler and journaling cards, then just upload your pictures directly from your phone or Dropbox. It is such an easy way to keep up with scrapbooking. I use the app on my iPad, so it's easy to do a page in the evenings if Andrew is watching a show I'm not as interested in. And since I usually have my iPad with me on trips, I've also started pages right away a few times.

As I mentioned, there are a few things that bother me with the app. It doesn't sync between devices, so when I open the app on my phone, none of the kits I've purchased on the iPad are available and I can't see or edit any of my pages. I also wish that it was compatible with Digital Project Life on the computer, but that is a separate software. If they were compatible, I could easily add pictures from my computer that are not on my phone. I'm sure over time some of these kinks will be fixed, but for now, the app does help me keep up with documenting our adventures. I have all our pages saved from January & February, so I'm already a little behind. And plan to print the pages as a complete album at the end of the year.

I'll let you know how the album comes out once I have it printed. I still haven't decided if I'll continue to use Project Life in the future, or try out My Publisher or something similar like Young House Love. I would love to have complete books starting from late 2010 when Andrew and I started dating. And I might make a smaller album with pictures between 2007 and 2011 to document that time of my life. Plus I still haven't finished our college years! Man, this is going to take forever but I really want to have our pictures documented. Especially before we have kids, otherwise I'm sure it would never happen!

Also important to note, I think the android app will be ready soon, but right now it's only for ios. I shared a few of the pages I that I've made so far below. Or you can check out this Pinterest board to see more examples of Project Life.