How to Buy & Store Digital Kits

For those of you who are a little overwhelmed by switching from paper scrapbooking to digital and don't know where to begin, then this lesson is for you :) I am going tell you how to get started into the digital world. Where to buy your kits, how to download, unzip, store and use them.

First of all there are MANY stores that sell digital scrapbook kits or elements. On our home page there is a long list of all the stores we buy from. So, just click on some of the links and see what you like. I personally am a huge fan of http://www.sweetshoppedesigns.com/ and that is where I get most of my kits from.

Most stores have their item broken down by Kits, Paper, Elements, Alpha....After you have found some kits or elements you want you simply add them to your shopping cart and then when you are all done hit "buy now" and it will either ask you for your credit card or lots of places take Paypal. After you have finished paying, it will automatically take you back to their site and give you a recipet with all your download links. There are typically 3 download links when you buy a kit. One for alpha, elements, and paper. Just click on a link and your computer will then ask you where you want to save it. All your downloads will be in zipped files, meaning you will have to unzip them later.

I save all my files to my external harddrive that I have just for my scrapbooking. I highly recommend it once you start getting lots of kits. But, you can just create a new folder on your computer and then just save them to that specific folder, like C:/pictures/scrapbook kits. Then inside that folder I keep all my kits in their own seperate sub-folders. like C:/pictures/scrapbook kits/sweetbaby kit. I have so many kits now that I have seperated my kits into different catergories like: Digi kits I, II, and III. And I have a seperate folder for all the elements I have purchased no in kits. You could organize them by color, season, holiday, or boy & girl if you wanted to. It is really nice to have everything organized into folders and subfolder sp you can find exacatly what you want quickly. Hopefully you can see what I mean from these screen shots.

Now I have gone into my "Digi Kits I" folder and here are all my kits.

Ok, enough with the organizing :) Next step....Once the files are downloaded to your computer, then go into the folder you have saved them to. Right click on the file and select "extract here" It will then unzip the file in that location. Do that for all your zipped files. Now they automatically in folders seperated by alpha, elements, and paper and are ready to use!

To use a element in your kit just simply double click on it. If it is your first time opening that type of a file it will ask you what program you want to use to open it. Select Adobe photoshop (or whatever program you use) from the list. Make sure that at the bottom of that menu the little box is checked that says "always use this program for this type of file". That way now when you double click on anything to open it, it will automatically just open it in photoshop.

Now you are ready to start scrapbooking. If you need any help read my step-by-step lesson. I hope that this was helpful and makes it a little bit easier to get started into digital shopping.