20 Comments
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Donna Druchunas's avatar

I love digital collage!

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Andrea Dixon's avatar

Me too! I like analog collage too but my job makes it hard to get to sometimes. With digital, I can do it anywhere, anytime. It’s perfect:)

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Victoria Kazarian's avatar

I absolutely love this! I create moodboards/storyboards for my writing projects (instead of outlines) and your article is very very helpful 👍

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Andrea Dixon's avatar

Oh I’m glad to hear it’s helpful and what a cool way to get writing projects off the ground. I’ve never heard of anyone doing it that way but that sounds super interesting.

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Francesca Bossert's avatar

But…how do you actually make them? Asking for a poet…

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Andrea Dixon's avatar

I will make you a quick video. It’s pretty easy and super fun to do:)

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Butch Laker's avatar

Great ideas for organization! I was JUST looking for a post like this because my images are flowing out of my ears atm.

I’ve heard of people downloading tagging apps so you can tag a photo with multiple different tags. I think I might try that first because I don’t want to store the same image multiple times in multiple folders.

Great ideas! I subscribed!

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Andrea Dixon's avatar

Hi Butch- I can relate! That’s why I had to get organized. You can think of the albums as tagging. I doesn’t save multiple copies of your photos, it’s just that when you ‘add’ them to any album, you’ll be able to see it when you click on that album. Just like if you select a tag you would see any photos with that tag. Not sure if that’s helpful but it relieves the necessity of yet another app if you want to avoid that.

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Butch Laker's avatar

That definitely helps! Thanks for the heads up! I want as few apps as possible..

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Kristin Tweedale's avatar

This is such an amazing resource! Thank you so much for all your hard work.

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Andrea Dixon's avatar

Thanks Kristin! It’s the info I wish someone had told me when I first started creating digital art.

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Kristin Tweedale's avatar

I’ve just started doing more digital stuff; and it was super helpful. Especially the folders; like I have folders of my photos for other things—but I hadn’t considered how easy that would make using all the digital assets. Because that has been a bit of a friction point. So thank you very much.

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Joi's avatar

If any other organizes their digital files in Dropbox, I would love some organizational tips. I have too much on my phone and want to save elsewhere for fear of deleting.

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Karen DeLucas's avatar

Love this! Especially seeing your screenshots of your catalog and seeing how you organize for creating. I would like to add the “search” function to this. iPhoto has come a long way with its search and as someone that has a ridiculous amount of photos (over 200,000) I use this all the time to help find interesting things in my catalog. I just did one for graffiti and found 227, most taken years ago.

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Andrea Dixon's avatar

Oh that’s great to hear! I have only ever used the search to try to find the photo of my license plate when checking in to a hotel (which it can never find!). I am going to explore that.

I try not to keep more than 3K photos on my phone but even that amount makes it hard to find things sometimes. Thanks for the great tip!

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Karen DeLucas's avatar

I have iCloud…and so have access to all my photos always…its a bit obsessive, but when I decided to stick with iPhoto years ago, i went all in.

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Lo Schroeder's avatar

I found this so helpful, thanks for sharing your tips!

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Kelly Russo's avatar

This is inspiring. I only work in analog collage right now, but I’m open to digital, especially in times when I can’t really cut stuff up in public. What app do you use for your collages?

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Andrea Dixon's avatar

Hi Kelly- it’s so fun. Definitely worth a try.

I use Afterlight and SuperimposeX for layering my photos. Afterlight is the easiest. SuperimposeX allows you to do more, but it’s not nearly as intuitive to learn. I use them both but enjoy working in Afterlight more.

I haven’t done a tutorial on SuperimposeX yet but I have a short one on Afterlight that shows you how to make a simple collage in case it’s helpful: https://andreadixon.substack.com/p/creating-digital-collage-art-quick?r=hiw1n

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Kelly Russo's avatar

Thank you! I might play around with it instead of scrolling!

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