I’m rather behind with Project Life and being laid up with morning sickness for two months hasn’t helped me catch up. We already know this so I won’t ramble on about it, instead I’ll tell you my plan to do something about it.

Enter the Collect App

A lot of people praise Collect and for good reason. This nifty iPhone app keeps track of your daily photos and creates print ready cards on export. The cards are either 3×4 or 6×4 and feature your photo, the date, and any journaling you added. The layout is clean and there’s a few styles to choose from. For my catch up plan I’m using the 3×4 sized cards.

Note: I have the paid app. Some of the features I talk about may not be available in the free version. Check which features are available to you if you have the free version and want to follow my plan.

The Plan

1. Sort out your photos. If you’re really far behind you may have already deleted photos from your phone. I only had from June onwards on my phone, but fortunately I’d already sorted my April and May photos into weekly folders on my PC, and tagged the ones I wanted to use. I used iTunes to sync these photos back onto my phone.

2. I mainly used Instagram photos to make the process less time consuming, but if you need to edit your photos, do that now. I like apps such as Pic Tap Go and Little Moments for editing and adding filters.

3. Open the Collect app and start adding your photos and journaling. I did this step yesterday and it took around two hours to add 150 photos into the app with journaling.

4. Export your photos to your camera roll. I think you need the paid app to do this.

5. Upload the photos to your computer. (If you print from your phone, you’re on your own until step 8. You’ll need to use an app like PicFrame to put 2 3×4’s onto a 6×4 canvas, then print from there)

6. Prepare your photos for printing. I put two 3×4 cards onto one 6×4 canvas using a free program called Photosheet. This program is easy to use; you drag and drop all your 3×4 cards into one side, specify what you want to output selecting 6×4 as the size and Grid 2 as the layout, choose where you’d like to save the photos and a minute or so later you’ll have all your 6×4’s ready to print.

7. Decide how you are printing. I am set up to print at home, but as I had 75 photos to print I uploaded them to my local Camera House.

8. Yay you have your physical photos! Once you have your photos, you’ll need to cut them all in half if you are using 3×4 pocket pages, then it’s just a matter of slipping them into pockets, adding filler cards, embellishment, and additional journaling.

Of course the last step is probably the most time consuming of the lot, and is where I am up to now. I’ll update on my progress in a few days as I’m determined to have my Project Life up to date before I embark on Ali Edward’s Week in the Life in a couple of weeks time.

Photos waiting to be sliced up and put into pockets.

Pros and Cons

The biggest pro for my plan is that it’s allowed me to get a lot of photos off to the printer and into an album in a small amount of time. The journaling is attached to the photos and my memories are preserved. The Collect cards have white space so there is room to stamp and further embellish them. I’ve also seen people cut them out and mount them on patterned paper to add more colour.

The cons though, are that you will have much smaller photos than you may have had when completing pages other ways. I usually print 4×4 photos which will probably be more pleasurable to look at and stand out more than these pages when I flip through the albums in the future. I’ve also found from previous layouts I’ve done using these cards is there can almost be too much white space if you aren’t prepared to add a bit of embellishment here and there. That said I was almost at the point of giving up on this year’s album, so the cons are outweighed for me.

Why the Collect App? Why not the Project Life App?

I’m sure some of you are wondering why I didn’t use the PL app. The PL app is great, but there’s a few reasons I haven’t used it in my catch up plan;

1. Most of my photos are square. Before I could use them in a standard pocket I’d need to use another app to put them on a 3×4 or 4×6 card, thus making the process longer.
2. Printing. The cost of printing one 12×12 is expensive compared to what I pay for 6 4×6’s. If I printed 12×12 I’d then need to purchase pockets for them.
3. I have a lot of digital collections on my PC but not in the app, and to put them all in dropbox was more work than I wanted.
4. I still want to use my physical products!

So there you have it! I hope this post is useful to someone else who is feeling quite daunted about how far behind they are. Let’s get that mojo back!