Mobile Monday | New App Love | Little Moments™

Just a quick update on this Mobile Monday!

Still planning to share more about tags, PicFrame and Over in tutorials. But I really wanted to share this new app called Little Moments™ by the folks that created Collect and Letterglow (two of my favorite apps) and of course by the blogger Chantelle Ellem, also known as Fat Mum Slim.

She has created the Fat Mum Slim Photo a Day challenges for a while now, and I have tried here and there to play along and keep up. I just never could stay motivated or inspired. And while I still may not be able to keep up, having inspiration from the prompts along with the cuteness of the app may just help spark some creativity in my current photo taking slump.

Currently, the app is iPhone only, and hopefully an Android version will be out soon.

I downloaded the app last week after my friend Chari Pack of Persnickety Prints shared she had created one of the filters in the app. How cool is that? Plus, one of my main problems with participating in a photo a day challenge is that I never remember what the prompts are.

First thing I noticed was that I love the name! Little Moments ™ is just perfect and I love the colors, the clean design and the options for filters, overlays and text right in the app. The prompts are right at your fingertips and you can share with ease to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Then, I suggest adding your photo to Collect or your photo calendar app of choice, to see your photo collection growing. It's great motivation and the reminders help too.

Little Tip: an easy way to add your title in Collect is to copy the text right before you upload to Instagram or other social media sites, then paste that as the title in Collect. (especially if you write more than just the name of the prompt.)

Also, if you tap on the "More" button and then "open in" button, options for other apps will appear and you can add open up Collect from there. If it doesn't work the first time, just go back to the Little Moments™app and try again. For some reason it takes a few tries sometimes.

So there you go! I wanted to share today, as it is the end of June and a new month of prompts begins tomorrow! So play along if you would like to, or just use some prompts to help keep you motivated and finding new creative ways to capture daily life.

Here are some of the photos I took over the past few days that were inspired by the prompts. Probably wouldn't have taken some of these otherwise. These are all photo cards from the app Collect.

Enjoy and have fun capturing all those Little Moments™! Also, if you share and tag your photos #littlemomentsapp you are entered in a cool prize pack including Origrami prints! Check it out here for more details.

Phone Photography Project 2 Winner!

And the winner of the seat in the Phone Photography Project 2 at Big Picture Classes is:

ejp71! who said, "I would love to win a seat in the class. I was sad to miss out on it last summer."

Congrats! Email me at annetteharing@yahoo.com and I will get you the information.

Thanks to everyone for entering! Loved reading the comments and hearing how everyone is excited about learning more about phone photography. I am for sure. I picked up an Olloclip and a GorillaPod this week and am having fun playing around with them. I'm excited to learn more as well. Will do an update on those when I have played with them enough to give a review. 

There is still time to register for the class. Click here to get signed up. I also have giveaways for Going Places and Here & There Inspiration coming up soon!

Mobile Monday | Using Tags in the Collect App

Hello! Welcome to my second post of my "Mobile Monday" feature! Thanks for the great feedback! I'm excited to share more about how I use mobile technology for memory keeping and excited to hear what you are using as well. I can easily get in a comfort zone and keep using the same apps, etc. I'm going to be challenging myself to try new apps, new techniques, etc as a way to keep learning and keep it fun.

Today I wanted to share more about how I made the "super mega collage" from last week. My plan is to break it down into three parts, and share one part each week.

First, this week I want to share how I use tags in the app Collect on my iPhone to curate and gather photos for stories I may want to tell. You can use the principles here even if you don't use Collect. See if the photo system you use includes tags or create folders to gather photos into that you want to keep. (Hint: you can even use tags, or hashtags, in Instagram and have those photos printed in one batch from Persnickety Prints.) In week 2, I want to share how to create the collage. I used PicFrame, but there are different apps that can get you the same result. And finally for week 3, I will share how to finish it up by adding the word art overlay. I used the app Over, but there are quite a few really great apps out there that you can use. 

Before we get too much into the details, I wanted to review what a tag is and why you might want to use them. 

So, what is a tag? Basically it is a keyword that you assign to a photo that allows you to find it again.

Let's use an example of donuts. Say you like going for donuts each week or month, or you just really like taking photos of donuts. If you tag your donut photos with the same keyword, over time you will have a great collection of photos to use. You could gather these photos and use them in a layout, create a photo book, mini book, print a bunch out and hang them on your wall…you get the idea.

Here's a screenshot of the tag "donuts" in my Collect App.

Not sure if this makes me want to make a layout or go on a donut run, but it is fun nonetheless!

For an awesome example of a Project Life® layout of a theme, check out this amazing page about coffee from Elise Blaha Cripe. 

For additional ideas on topics to use for tags, I would highly recommend any class by Stacy Julian. I've taken her Library of Memories/Photo Freedom classes and they are so great. She is the queen of "connection based pages" as she calls them and really does have some great systems for gathering your stories. The class, Inspired Scrapbooking at Big Picture Classes has lots of great ideas for topics you may want to use for tags.

Another resource highlighting stories/themes/topics is the eBook Project Dig Deep at Big Picture Classes, where we took a theme/topic inspired by our chronological scrapbook/Project Life and then created new pages about that theme. My topics were personality and traditions. Both were fabulous topics for me, and I adore these pages, but since I had not been using tags, gathering the photos was a pain in the you know where. That's when I really understood the power of using tags, and although I do use them more than I used to, I still don't use them as much as I should. Seriously, they are so easy to add. It only takes a few more taps and then all that curating power is literally at your fingertips.

Okay, so are you ready to get started? Here is a step by step of how I use them in the app Collect.

The first thing you need to do is add a tag to your photo card in Collect.

Start by tapping the edit icon to bring up the edit screen. Here is where you add your title, notes, etc. You can also tap Tags and the tags screen comes up. Here you can add a tag by typing it in the box. You can also search with this screen or just move the screen up or down to find your tag. I honestly don't have too many tags or I would get overwhelmed.

You can see below, all you do is tap to select your tag, and you can select more than one for a photo. On the bottom right you can see the tag is now added to the photo card, and when you do a search from your main calendar view, this will now be included in the search.

The second step isn't actually required, but it's a nice feature so you can get a view of what photos you have tagged. This is helpful if you are wanting to do a collage with a certain number of photos. If you don't have enough, you can go back through the photos and see if there are more that you can tag, which is what I did for my collage. I knew I had started a pretty good collection, but had been a bit lazy about adding tags. (I honestly consider it a pretty big accomplishment if I even get photos added, so adding tags for me is like adding the lime to my Diet Coke…it's just so good and easy to do but I never want to actually slice up the lime. Just too much work so it seems. But seriously so good if I will do it!)

To search tags, from your main calendar view, tap the bottom right icon. It's three little dots. When you tap that, the search tags and show dates comes up. Tag "Search tags" and the next screen is the tag screen, where you can search or scroll to find your tags. Simply tap on the tag you want and then it will bring up all the photos you have tagged.

Here is my 2014 album. You can see there are 20 photos. Below that you can see my 2013 album, which has 66 photos. Plenty for me to use for the mega collage. I just repeated the export process for both albums. (I'll go more into why I do different albums for each year in another post.)

Now you are ready to begin exporting your photos to use in your collage. (You can also use them for a scrapbook or Project Life®/pocket page layout, mini book, photo book or other photo project.)

From your main calendar view, this time tap on the bottom left icon, which looks like a little rectangle with an up arrow on it. Tap on that icon and the Export Photos option opens up. Tap on Export Photos, then for photos only, select Export Style and then the Photos Only.

You can change the dates by selecting those, scrolling back to January or whenever you started your album.

Next, tap the back arrow so you are on the main Export page. Now you are ready to select the tag to export.

Tap on the Tags button and the Tags screen will come up. Select the tags you want to export and then select back to the main export page.

Now you are ready to export! At the very bottom is the Export button. Tap Export, and either Camera Roll or Dropbox for where you want to save your photos to. I selected Camera Roll. Photos will be exported to your camera roll. (note if you have a lot it may take a few minutes)

And there you have it! Photos from a tag that you have now curated over time to really show the story you want to tell with photos. (You can always add words, and I highly suggest that you do, but photos curated over time really tell a story as well.)

Challenge for you: create some tags and see if you can tag at least 9 photos for our challenge next week. I will walk you through how to create a collage next week, so you will need at least 9 if you want to do one of the 9 photo collages. If you want to add more, try tagging 36, and if you want to do the super mega one, you will need 81. (you can always add several of the same photo, especially when they are small it's not too big of a deal.) 

Then export the photos so they are ready to use. If you are playing along using other software or another app, export and save your photos so they are ready to be made into a collage next week.

So let's get tagging and curating those stories we want to tell. We can do it!

Mobile Monday Kickoff | Phone Photography Project 2 Giveaway!

Hello again! And welcome to a new blog feature, something that has been in my heart and mind for a long time now. Finally breaking through the ______________ (insert any excuse) and just doing it. Why not, right?

If you have followed me for a while, you may know that I use my smart phone for a lot of my memory keeping. I definitely don't consider myself an expert, but I know that it has helped me capture way more memories and to create pages and layouts for those memories that I know I would normally have been able to do. Now here's the thing. I would love to learn more and share more. I just think it is amazingly exciting to be living at a time when we have this technology at our fingertips!

So I'm launching a new blog series called Mobile Memory Keeping. My goal is to post on Mondays, hence the "Mobile Mondays" title.

Really? Me? Keep up with anything blog related? Well, we'll just have to see how it goes. But I really do want to do this. I have for a long time and those thoughts are what has kept me from doing it.

So why not? Let's do this thing! (you've got to start somewhere, right?)

So my first post is a fun photo collage I created from the apps Collect  and PicFrame and finally the app Over for the word art. I hope to have a video tutorial up for you next week. (Collect and Over are only on iPhone; PicFrame is for both iPhone and Android.)

I call this the super mega collage. I have been wanting to create something like this for a long time. I have used Picasa in the past on my desktop and loved how it turned out. But I have yet to do it on my phone. I saw Rhonna Farrer's example on Instagram and knew I wanted to do something with the photos I had been collecting of my husband and my daughter for Father's Day.

So I simply exported the photos I had been collecting under the tag "Sam and Maggie relationship" in my Collect App. I've been using it since January 2013 and have used tags to some extent. I had already started a tag for this, but maybe only 15-20 were tagged. My original idea was to create a photo book with the photos (and I still might do that). So back in early June I started going back and adding tags to the photos that had both of them in it; especially ones that showed their relationship. Then I exported them and added them to the collage in PicFrame.

The PicFrame trick is really fun. You create 9 of the 9-photo grids, then add those back to a 9 photo template. Hello, brilliant! (thank you Rhonna for your brilliance! And by the way, if you haven't already, check out her amazing app here.)

Here are three of the regular 9 photo collages created in PicFrame. I just adore how I was able to find pictures from her birth to now to create a time capsule of photos so to speak. I just love that and as I look through all of the photos, my mind is flooded with memories and emotions. I remember laughing or noticing something special and grabbing my phone. I love this kind of collage.

Then I added the word art in the app Over. I did have to purchase the pack ($1.99). But I just adore the script and thought it was so beautiful.

So there it is! My first post! I hope to figure out a link up feature so you can share what mobile memory keeping you are working on. For now, just use the hashtags #mobilememorykeeping and/or #mobilemondays so we can share and learn from each other!

And as a reward for making it through this post, I am beyond thrilled to announce I have a giveaway!! Yes, the amazing class, the Phone Photography Project at Big Picture Classes is back for round 2! And it is all new!! I took it last year, and you can get version one as a self paced class now to start working on. Then the second round starts July 17th. It is really awesome to not only learn a ton, but to see the sharing on Instagram for this class. It's really cool.

Here is the official information about the class:

The Phone Photography Project 2

28 days of photo tips, app tutorials, and iPhone awesomeness

Class begins 7/17/2014 and cost is $59.00

About the Class

Would you like to take better photos with the camera you always have with you—your smartphone?

Get ready to transform your mobile photography in a brand-new interactive workshop, The Phone Photography Project 2, starting July 17. Twenty expert iPhoneographers have collected their best tips, tricks, and tutorials for phone photography, and they're ready to share it all with you inside a private online classroom—with lots of fun happening on Instagram, too.

With practical tips for mastering lighting, composition, editing, and more, this workshop will give you the tools you need to create impressive photos you'll be proud to share online, in your home, or in your scrapbooks.

Questions? Click here for the FAQ page. 

Learn more and register here

And because I always love the promo videos, you can check that out here.

So to enter, just leave a comment below and for an additional entry, comment on my post on Instagram if you have an account. I will pick a winner next Monday! I would love to hear what Mobile Memory Keeping you are working on or would like to know more about!

contest is now closed. thanks for entering!