Printing Photos for Scrapbooking

Today I have a hint about how to ensure you print your photos the size you're going to need when you make a scrapbook.   I use Microsoft Word for printing my photos, and that program makes it easy to crop photos and size them as I want.  But what size DO I want?  I hate printing a photo, only to find it's too big or too small for how I want to use it on the scrapbook page.  Such a waste of ink and photo paper!  If you can find a scrapbook sketch you like that has photo sizes on it, you're set pretty well, but too often I can't - or frankly don't even want to take the time to look.  This is what I've found works pretty well for me:

I found that a small pad of paper I got in bulk - Office Depot brand - was PERFECT for sketching out layouts!  It's 1/4" ruled and I used 1/4" to represent 1".  That made it really easy to draw my sketches to scale so I knew what size I needed.  I found on this small sheet of lined paper (approx 5" x 7") I could draw two single pages or one double page layout.  Here are a couple of examples:

Example One:

And here's a picture of the dual page spread I made (already posted in a different post but put here so you can see the comparison) from this sketch:

Example Two:   

This time I sketched two single pages.  And here are the results:

You can see I ended up modifying this a bit when making it - put the pictures closer together and made the bottom border of pictures so it didn't stretch all the way across the page, but the sizes I got from the sketch still worked well for printing the pictures, journaling block, and title.

And here's how the 2nd turned out:

Again, I modified it a bit from the original sketch.  This time I found tickets I wanted to include, so moved the picture that I had planned to have in their spot, to the bottom row - just put them all closer together.  I also decided to print a small closeup of a swan that was on the canal to use as an embellishment. (since it wasn't on the original sketch & I didn't know what size I wanted, I printed this in several sizes, knowing that I would use the rest on cards or something.)