I like to use multiple photos. Very seldom I will do a layout with only one photo unless is bigger that 4x6.

Yeah, I agree with Andra. It depends on the situation. Maybe I only have one photo for a particular subject (or sometimes none!). Other times I have several that will work together very well. For me it would be really boring to have all the pages in an album the same. Sometimes you get rolling on an album and the photos just find their own places and sort themselves out, or so it seems, and I just go with the flow as they say.

I know what you mean! I am new-ish to all this too and was trying to find a way to fit more pictures into my layouts. I recently bought some divided up page protectors and my plan is to do the simple layouts with one or two pictures then slide more pictures into the divided up pages. I also buy wallet sizes of my photos so that I can fit more into my projects.

I am trying those as well. WIsh me luck!

Another option is to create the page you want with the one or two best photos and then if you have more photos, add them into the album with a 6x12 page protector....you can also add journalling this way if you can't fit it on your page.

I like the creative part of scrapbooking but I also want to tell a story....sometimes I just can't fit all the pics on my LO and still do it the way I want to....I just put the extra ones in a smaller page protector....

Alison

I agree... scrap the number of pictures that suit your event or thought of the layout.

For me, I don't make additional photo albums; I just do my scrapbooks, so the one photo layouts don't work so well for me. Of course, cropping the photos as small as possible without losing something helps. To help minimize the clutter of a "high multiple pic page" I will go minimalistic with the colors/prints of the papers, concentrating mainly on a side border and then I go easy on embellishments. Nothing wrong with a plain white background with a little here and there in that situation. There will always be a 3/4 page layout later I can really go hog wild with.

I have done multi-photo pages but I'd rather showcase one or two at a time. I usually just pick out my favorite photo from an event and focus on that. When I first started scrapbooking I stressed a lot about making sure each photo got scrapped. As many photos as I take that's pretty much impossible, so I felt I had to do a little compromising.

I'm sure most people have already said this, but I thought I'd throw my two cents in for good measure. I think that it depends on four main things:

1) What message are you trying to get across with your photos? Are you trying to highlight something in particular?

2) What paper are you using? Sometimes the paper can overwhelm the photos (or vice versa)

3) How many photos did you take for this event and how many do you want to use to tell the story?

4) How much of the other "stuff" do you want on the page? Will your embellishments have a place to fit in or will it be out of place?

This will give you a lot to think about, but if you approach your pages with this mentality, I think it will help a lot.

-Stephanie

My 2 cents... I've been scrapbooking for 12 years. Over time my style has changed and evolved. I have found my place in the scrapbooking world and it is as a simple, clean line, hybrid girl. 99% of my scrapbooking is of my children. I tend to take between 500-800 photos a month! Considering that for the past 3 years or so I've only been able to scrap twice a year at weekend retreat, I don't scrapbook everything. I pick my absolutely favorite photos and scrap them. They give me inspiration and make me happy. I don't scrap in order, I don't feel the need to scrap events because they happened. I know that I am in the minority but it is what works for me. I like the photos to speak to me and not feel pressure to scrap every little thing. That being said I don't think I crowd my photo with unnecessary embellishments just to fill space; I am totally fine with white space. In fact I have a LO that has NO embellishments at all (I'll have to find it and post it). Hang on....

Here it is... laugh By SHeaRI

I began scrapping in 2003...back then most of my layouts were two pagers with multiple photos....then I joined the forums here in 2008 and my style changed...I do lots and lots of one pic layouts now. I scrap more for the art of it now instead of the story. I may change back some day.
One of my early layouts had 25 pics on it. Now if I have 3 on a page that's a lot and I seldom do 2 pagers.

Love your layout Sheari - that is gorgeous and it doens't need another thing. In fact anything else would take away from it - perfect as is.

I think you have to go back to why you scrap. We all have different reasons.

Many of the scrappers here are talented artists and the one-photo pages really give them a chance to shine. I'm not that good. I can't pull off a one-photo layout very often. I'm not an artist. But I don't care about the artist angle for me all that much. Maybe with just a few of my granddaughter but those layouts are rare.

I scrap vacation and trip and cruise layouts. For those, I like a lot of photos because I want to remember every thing we saw on the trip. If my husband says "where did we eat at the Chinese restaurant with the aquaruium and such and such happened" I can look it up. If we are talking about a building or statue, I can look it up in my scrapbooks.

WHen we go through our books we see everything we saw when we were travelling there and all the memories are intact through photos and journaling. Therefore I scrap all of my vacation photos - unless they are fuzzy, blurry or close duplications.

You just have to do what is right for you.

But for the person who scraps to documents trips and the person who scraps to capture special moments with a child or grandchild or a person who is really an artist at heart and they just want to make something beautiful... those are all different reasons to make scrapbooks and all are going to use different numbers of pictures.