Create Your Own Photo Bookmarks

If you're like me you probably have about six books that you're reading all at the same time. Usually I'm reading one good Robert B. Parker mystery (the Spencer series are my favorite fun books) and about five or six nonfiction books. Keeping track of where I am in each book would be hopeless without bookmarks, but I can never seem to find a bookmark when I want one! In fact, most of my reading places are marked with everything from (losing) lottery tickets to bits of junk mail.

Then one day I was doodling around on the computer and had this idea to create me own photo bookmarks. It's really simple. All I do is find a pretty photo that looks like it might make a nice bookmark and that will crop well as a tall skinny vertical. In Photoshop (and I assume other programs) you can actually tell it what dimensions you want to crop the image to and so I chose (arbitrarily) 2" wide x 7" tall.

Once you set those parameters in the cropping toolbar, you can just go through several photos and create quick crops. Then I open a "new" document in Photoshop (this step is just to save paper) and copy and paste each new image to the blank sheet. I can fit 4 bookmarks across (with a small space between each) on an 8.5 x 11" sheet of printing paper. I print the bookmarks then slice them up with a paper cutter or scissors. I print them on heavyweight matte paper just because it's cheap paper and it's durable. Glossy paper would probably look nicer.

If you get ambitious you could even use a type function to put your name or a little inspiring quote on the bookmark. And if you get overly ambitious, you can pass these out to friends at school or work or just mail them to a friend that likes to read. Then you're in the bookmark publishing business. It's fun, creative and cheap and you'll always know where you are in your books.