Scrapbooking By The Numbers - Lots

This first page has 13 photos on it!  When I have lots of photos to go on a page, I often use a collage/grid effect.  There are a couple of challenges in designing a page like this - sizing your photos, and ensuring you have a focal point.

For the "sizing the photos" bit, I find I like to use software to help me.  Most photo programs have photo re-sizing and ruler capabilities so you can make sure the photos are the size you want, but this can be cumbersome and time consuming.  I use a program called FotoFusion (from Lumapix) that allows me to easily arrange the photos into a collage/grid.  I then save the layout as a jpeg, pull it into my photo program, and "cut" or "crop" each photo so it will be the size I want it to be.  I can then create a blank photo that is the size of my paper and the same resolution as my photos, and place as many as possible onto this blank background (without resizing them!) and print it up.  This allows me to save paper and easily ensure my photos are the size I want them.

So far as a focal point is concerned, there are a variety of ways to address this.  You can easily see that I created my focal by using a larger picture and putting it on a slight angle.

Here we have 14 pictures on one page. For the focal in this example, I used a larger photo with subject matter different from most of the other pictures (waterfall instead of "flora").  Putting the title on the photo also draws attention to it.

There are actually 19 photos on this page!  In this layout, the journaling is actually the focal point.  The white background for the journaling helps it "pop".  However, there is a secondary focal photo - the one above the journaling and slightly to the left.  It is less "busy" than many of the other photos, larger than many, and has a comparatively large person in the picture. Thus, when you're done reading the journaling, your eye naturally gravitates to that picture before moving on around the rest of them. 

Since there are so many pictures on this page, and their subject matter is rather "busy", it helped to have a wide margin on the page, to help tone it down a bit.  It also helped to mat the photos and journaling as one large block.