APPS SPECIAL ....Scrapbooking on the go

Scrapbooking on the go

Preserve precious memories without the gluey, glittery mess with these handy apps

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Preserving previous memories in the form of scrapbooks is a tradition that has continued even into the digital age. Families gets together to laboriously and lovingly put together scraps of paper, photos, ticket stubs, glitter, hand-drawn typography into one beautiful ensemble that perfectly represents memories of babies born, holidays enjoyed, and festivities enjoyed.

Scrapbooking is a great way to keep kids busy too. But while it is fun, it can also get messy with pieces of frilly detritus, glue mishaps and glitter where it doesn’t belong. If that’s got you thinking that “there has got to be a neater way of doing this,” well, there is. Here are a bunch of great apps that help you scrapbook your heart out, even when you’re out and about.

Project Life

Free (with in app purchases)

true scrapbooking app, Project Life A lays an emphasis on predefined layouts, which is ideal for those who prefer to create quick collages and scrapbooks without worrying too much about the layout. The app focusses on speed, letting you throw together several templates, images and text into the

mix. While it does not have the handmade feel that you can get in Bamboo Paper or Paper by Fifty Three, it does help you execute your ideas quickly.

Bamboo Paper

Free (with in app purchases)

Made by one of the paragons of inking hardware, Wacom, Bamboo Paper is available on all platforms – iOS, Android and Windows. It works best if you have a stylus, but your fingers work just fine as well. Bamboo Paper is essentially a note taking app, but you can also paste images, doodle on them and essentially create a very organic, handmade scrapbook which you can organise into little books that look like digital Moleskines.

Pic Collage

Free (with in app purchases)

As the name suggests, Pic Collage allows you to combine your photos into collages. There’s a ton of apps that do this, but Pic Collage has a tasteful collection of embellishments that you could mix and match into your photos to create some stunning scrapbooks. You can then save them to your cloud photo collections and share them through your favourite chat and social media apps.

Paper by Fifty Three

Free (with in app purchases)

An alternative to Bamboo Paper and Noteshelf, Paper by Fifty Three is known for its beautiful, smooth inking engine that just seems to flow. The toolkit has a certain handmade feel to it, with the scissors tool allowing you to paste in pictures, draw over things and create not only Moleskine-like notebooks with personalised covers, but also some really beautiful scrapbooks.

Noteshelf

Free (with in app purchases)

Falling under the same category of Paper and Bamboo Paper, Noteshelf is available only on iOS devices. The defining point of this app is that it allows you to record notes, which adds a neat multimedia aspect to the scrapbooking process. Primarily a note taking app, it’s one of those apps that really does scrapbooks well. You can also save each scrapbook and sync them with Evernote, iCloud, iDrive or Google Drive so that your scrapbooks are safe.

Keynote/ Powerpoint

While these are meant for creating presentation, they also are fantastic scrapbooking apps. With their inherent use of vector scalable graphics, you can copy paste elements easily into these apps. Keynote and Powerpoint allow you to cut and modify pictures with snazzy presets, plus they allow you to create some amazing animations. You can use slides in their usual landscape format and share them as PDFs or you can orient them as A4 pages for printing. The advantage of Keynote is that it comes free with your Mac or iOS device, while Powerpoint is a paid application. That said, there are also free presentation tools out there you can try out, like Google Slides, although it does have a leaner feature set.

Avinash Bali
MM14MAY18