By Pete Fontaine

Digital Scrapbooking is the hugely popular art of turning your precious photographic memories into beautiful personalized creations. And the good news is that the net is loaded with free and inexpensive tutorials, creation software, and community. You will never be at a loss for creative ideas, new and innovative tools, layouts, and templates.

Restricting yourself to using just your digital photographs is no longer necessary. You can add hundreds of your older photos to your digital photo gallery for as little as 5 cents each. By sending your pictures to an inexpensive scanning service you can fill in those missing decades in your digital scrapbooks.

Scanning photos for your scrapping hobby has the added advantage of preserving them from deterioration due to moisture, mold, or age. Saving your photos to a DVD also allows you to store a copy in two or more places permanently shielding them from loss or damage. Scanning services make it possible to give a complete set of all your pictures to family members.

If you've ever wanted to build a photobook or upload your photos to a photo sharing site then you'll have an additional benefit to scanning photos for your scrapbook. Want to build a slideshow to view on TV? You can do it online or buy inexpensive software. You can even add your own music. Want to create a T-shirt with a crazy photo on it? Just search "photo t-shirt". It's that easy!

Use a photo scanner who will scan your ordinary photographs at 300 dpi. Lower resolutions than that are not suitable for creating a master record of your photos. Higher resolutions mean you are paying for something that you are not really gettinga better quality scan. But, make sure they save your scans as high quality jpeg files. High quality jpegs have bigger file sizes because they are compressed very little but they produce better images. These larger files can always be minimized for various uses, if necessary, but keep the original file.

Find a photo scanner who offers an inexpensive photo enhancement service. These services can make descent improvements to most of your photos. Don't pay a lot for this because it won't perform miracles, and it won't fix all of the problems. But beware; always enhance a copy of your original scans. Don't let a photo scanner send just the enhanced scans. Photo enhancement as well as any manipulation or rotation of your scans means they will be recompressed. Repeated recompression means loss of image quality.

The web is loaded with digital scrapbooking accessories, communities, and educational materials. You can find e-books and embellishments of every kind. Put these tools together with scans from an economical photo scanning service and you're on your way!

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