Digital Scrapbooking: How to Download Digital Kits

Although I've been a traditional scrapbooker for years, I have only recently begun dabbling with the art of digital scrapbooking. I have several reasons for doing so -- 1.) It's cheaper. Plenty of digital scrapbooking kits and elements can be downloaded for free online. 2.) Since I take all my pictures with a digital camera, they're already stored on my computer. Digital scrapbooking makes it so I don't have to use tons of ink printing out all the photos to use on regular layouts. 3.) I can edit the photos to suit my needs by resizing the pixels or altering the colors to black and white or sepia. 4.) It's easy to share the finished pages with friends and family via e-mail.

The first step in digital scrapbooking is downloading the components you will need to create your pages. Here's how to download these kits and elements with Windows XP and extract them for everyday use.

1. Download a free digital kit from a site like shabbyprincess.com by clicking on the image. If you're using dial-up, scroll to the bottom of the page where you can download the file in three separate parts.
2. A dialog box will come up with the option to either Open With or Save to Disk. Select Open With: CompressedFolder (default) and click OK. Check mark the box next to where it says "Do this automatically for files like this from now on". This makes it so the files will always begin downloading automatically without you having to press OK. The file will begin downloading.
3. Once it's finished, the file will be displayed in a new Windows Explorer screen. From here, it needs to be un-zipped. In the box on the left, click the link that says Extract All Files. Click Next, then click Browse to select where you want to store your digital scrapbooking downloads. I clicked My Documents, then Create New Folder, and created an entire folder that I named "Digital Scrapbooking" so it'd be easy to find and remember. Click OK, then Next, and the file will un-zip. Click Finish.
4. Repeat this step as many times as necessary for all your downloads.
5. When you're done, open up your digital imaging program such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Click File à Open à Navigate to your "Digital Scrapbooking" folder à double-click the papers and embellishments you want to use for your first layout and voila!

There are a slew of other places that offer free digital kits that you can download and use on your scrapbook pages. Try doing a Google search for free digital kits or digital scrapbooking freebies, or check out one of my many favorite sites here -------------->