Fun of Scrapbooking, on The IPad

If you’ve never scrapbooked before, this app is going to be a fun discovery process for you. But if you’ve put together a physical scrapbook, you’ll be happy to see how that process has been elegantly adapted for the iPad and the digital age.

Scrapbooks are different than photo albums in that they are supposed to tell the story behind the pictures. Skrappy gives you a lot of tools to do that. Like physical scrapbooks you can choose a theme, then add and rearrange your photos and page layouts. You can also add text boxes to tell a little more about who or what is in the photos. But you are also able to attach movies, audio recordings, or links to the web, which can bring a whole new dimension to the scrapbook storytelling process.

Skrappy ties into the photos on your iPad, which are synced through iTunes to your computer. The same is true of music that you can choose to autoplay when you come to a particular page or when you tap on an object. And you can save your Skrappy projects as a PDF and use iTunes to transfer it to your computer for use there.

It seems that almost everything can be customized. Themes can be chosen or created. Background images can be selected. Photos can be added, moved, rotated, sized, flipped, aligned, and locked to prevent further changes. Text can be sized, colored, aligned, and made of dozens of fonts. Clip art and shapes can be added. Skrappy uses the layer concept to allow you to select one object at a time without confusing either yourself of the app with other objects.

Your finished projects can be shared by handing over your iPad, hooking it up to a TV or projector, exporting as a PDF document, sending by email, or printing through a wireless printer. You can also create a custom theme and share that too.

If you’ve got photos with a story to tell, this app would be a great way to get them organized. It’s full-featured to allow you maximum flexibility. You can slowly build your project in a spare minute here and there, or you can get comfy on the couch and crank out an entire project in one sitting. Either way Skrappy scrapbooks will be fun to create and share.