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Web 2.0 has entered the crafts world with this great site, Scrapblog. You can create some beautiful looking photo albums that incorporate photos and video straight from your Flickr account or You Tube!! That's right, there's no need to upload anything new to this site. You can design your own pages through their web interface and use an existing theme or spend time to make your own. When you enter the site, you can play and create an album right away without having to commit to registering on the site, which is free anyway.
The web interface of Scrapblog is a Flash application. It's very easy to use but I had to remind myself not to do the Apple-Z command to undo. All the commands you need are on panels that float on the right hand side to modify photos or basic commands. I started with an existing theme called Etherality. There are some beautifully designed themes in Scrapblog and you have a lot to choose from. You can also just start with a blank page and design everything yourself with all their backgrounds and frames provided.
To start designing just click on the "Get Photos" button on the left of the application. Enter in your Flickr account info to pull up your photos. You can also upload photos directly into the Scrapblog app, or get it from Yahoo!, Photobucket, and Webshots. Once your photos are pulled in, you can browse freely or by album. For demonstration purposes I picked a few photos from my Maker Faire CRAFT set in Flickr to test out this new application.
From the left hand accordion bar navigation, you can drag and drop your chosen photo over the template photo and it's immediately scaled and replaced. You can also choose to change background patterns and picture frames. TO add captions to your photos simple type in the text area. You can also enlarge any caption area to your liking. Navigate between your album pages from the bottom bar by just clicking on the icons. You can also add pages from there and duplicate any you like. There are so many cool features you could probably spend hours just playing with all the different elements. If you're in a hurry, you can just make a standard album quickly. I love this about Scrapblog.
Here's the final preview. I made a simple five page album here to just test out all the features. Overall it was very easy to use and I'm looking forward to creating more elaborate albums and adding in video. There's settings to create a slideshow or to post this to your blog. There's no print feature yet but you could easily take a screenshot and print your album out as a keepsake.The web site is really well designed so you can go straight to you own Scrapblog right away or explore all the other Scrapblogs out there.
