MOUNTING STAMP COLLECTIONS DIGITALLY

Not so long ago we started experimenting with something we’d describe as mounting collections digitally. In practice, it’s very similar process to creating DIY stamp album pages, but there’s one major exception: the pages are never printed on paper. They remain in digital format all the way, meaning that I even mount my stamps (or more precisely images of them) digitally too… Below is a small teaser how the collection of “Russian Empire era Finland” looks when done like this.

Our workflow to produce the above pages consists of few steps. First we created the pages with AlbumEasy; an easy-to-use free software for creating stamp album pages in PDF-format. When I had prepared a single page PDF-file, I opened it up in image editing program . Finallywe imported the stamp images from my scanner to page I had open for editing, lined the stamps to their proper places and saved the file…We admit that this method has much more work than placing stamps to stock book; which is why I never intent to do this in fast pace or in wider scale. But it definitely feels nice to see ones collection mounted so nicely

The fact that the pages remain constantly in digital format opens up a lot of possibilities IMHO. We could include a lot of additional information (like catalog values, background of stamps and other details, personal notes etc.) to pages, and make them function as a personal reference book. And best part is that I never have to print out anything, or move around the real stamps as page layout / collection changes (but if I want to do so, I still can)…Thinking of all the possibilities makes me really excited where this could lead into.

Happy collecting!