— Blog · DIY —
Scrapbooking is one of those crafts that comes and goes in twenty-year waves. It peaked in the 1990s, faded with the rise of digital photos, and is now in a quiet but persistent comeback driven by people who realize Instagram archives are not actually keepsakes. Photobooth prints are the perfect ingredient for a modern scrapbook — small, consistent in size, easy to lay out, and emotionally rich.
Here are practical scrapbook formats built around photobooth prints. Pick one. Start small.
Junk journals are intentionally messy scrapbooks made from found materials: ticket stubs, receipts (real ones), envelopes, magazine clippings, dried flowers, handwritten notes. Photobooth prints fit perfectly. They're the same physical scale as ticket stubs, which makes pages feel coherent.
Buy a basic junk journal at a craft store or make one from a sturdy notebook. Don't worry about straight edges or symmetric layouts. Tape things in at odd angles. Write captions in the margins. The aesthetic is "accumulation," not "design."
For trips, dedicate one small notebook to the journey. On day one, take a photobooth strip wherever you're staying (a hotel room, an Airbnb, a friend's apartment). Tape it to the first page. Each subsequent day, add a strip plus a paragraph: where you went, what you ate, what surprised you.
At the end of the trip, you have a paper artifact that's far better than a phone album. Years from now, you'll pick it up and remember details that no photo grid would surface.
One photobooth strip per week, for a year. That's 52 strips. They'll all fit in a single small album with room to spare for notes. Each entry: the strip, the date, one sentence about the week.
The cumulative effect is remarkable. You'll see your hair grow, your style shift, your friend group evolve. Things that feel imperceptible week-to-week become obvious across a year of small snapshots.
Pick five friends. Over the course of a year, take a photobooth strip with each one whenever you see them. Glue them all into a small book, one or two per page, with the date and a note. At the end of the year, gift each friend their own copy of the book.
This kind of thing sounds elaborate. It isn't — fifty strips, glue stick, a $5 notebook. It will mean enormously more to the recipient than almost any other gift you could give for the same money.
Buy a small album with sleeve-style pockets (the kind designed for trading cards or 4x6 photos). Don't glue anything. Just slot strips into the sleeves, one per pocket. The advantage: easy to add, easy to reorder, easy to swap out. Disadvantage: you don't write directly on the page.
If you go this route, use small adhesive labels or printed tags inside each sleeve for captions.
Pick a theme. Build a whole scrapbook around it. Examples:
Themed scrapbooks have the great property of being finished projects, not endless ones. You start with a clear end in mind. The endpoint makes the project feel meaningful from the start.
Some recommendations:
Don't spend more than 30 seconds laying out a page. The whole point of scrapbooking with photobooth prints is to make a quick, satisfying artifact — not a museum piece. The scrapbooks people actually finish are the ones with low expectations and high consistency. Five-minute pages, done weekly, beat one-hour pages, done never.
The best scrapbook is the one that gets to year ten. Aim for survivable, not flawless.