Album Pages On Cd - Anyone Familiar With This Source?

@GeoffHa: I've had Dr. Chang's collection (your link) bookmarked for a long time and visit it occasionally to drool (but not on my keyboard!!). I haven't looked at all his collections. But the pages I've seen all are pre-printed Scott Specialty pages. Looking at his bookshelves on the home page, those seem to be almost all Scott Specialty binders.

With the exception of one or two comments, there's not much response to the initial question asked about these CD's. So here's what I've heard.

From what I've read (and I don't own these CD's), these are not useful for making stamp albums. They're a random assortment of images (scans) of stamp album pages from other people's collections, not the blank album pages you seem to be looking for. Plus more scans of articles about stamps and other things. It's a mishmash that might be interesting to browse through if that's your interest, but if you're interested in blank album pages to print out, that's apparently not what this is. Or so I've been told.

The inevitable Steiner suggestions are worth considering as Bill Steiner's blank album pages cover everything. They can be used to print small 8.5 x 11" "notebook" size pages on a home pinter -- and his layouts can be printed on larger pages in the more standard stamp album page sizes. I've printed Steiner pages onto blank Scott Specialty pages many times to create a missing page or two where I didn't want to buy an entire group of pages just to get the one or two I needed.

And it's possible to copy Steiner page files into MS Word (or PowerPoint) in order to make changes to them - to delete the Steiner page border, for example, which is very easy to do. Or to delete stamp boxes you don't want, as well as making other changes -- though I've found doing this very fiddly and somewhat difficult. Why do that? To create larger album pages to fit your own album. You print a borderless page on your own printer and use it as your original to photocopy from onto a blank (but bordered) Scott (or other brand) album page. You end up with a Steiner page layout printed on a bordered album page that matches any album whose blank pages can go through a photocopy machine.

Or you can print directly onto these same blank pages at home using a wide-bed printer. I don't have one of those, so I use Fedex to photocopy onto blank bordered pages, and they end up looking much like the originals. In fact, you could do an entire album this way -- and I've done that a few times for countries that do no have albums for them. The result is a "Scott Specialty" album printed on blank Specialty pages using Steiner page layouts.

You can also order Steiner pages printed on 8.5 x 11" paper or Scott International, Scott Specialty, or Minkus size paper from the "AlbumPages" website, and they'll print them for you pretty inexpensively. My only quibbles are that doing it this way you're stuck with the Steiner border, and the paper used does not quite match the slightly yellowish-white of Scott paper but is a little whiter.

Order just the blank paper from the same source and print them yourself as above with your own borders or the original Steiner borders. Same thing.

There are also at least a dozen other websites with typically one-country, blank pages offerings, often at no cost. Browsing the web is the way to find these. I know of one for France, for example. I don't find most of them very appealing. The tendency is to overcrowd the page layouts, for one thing, which is also sometimes a problem with Steiner pages though not so often with those.

You asked about "various album pages . . .to fill in missing areas" using "ready-to-print" pages, and these methods address that pretty well. And they're far less expensive than the alternatives.

http://www.stampalbums.com

http://www.albumpages.net/

Good luck -- and have fun.

There is a compilation of philatelic album page website links here
https://stampsmarter.org/features/Links_Home.html
(Click on 'View By Type' and then select 'Album Pages' from drop down box)
Don

DrewM wrote:


There is also of course https://www.thestampweb.com/albums/...stamp-albums which lists about 300 free one country albums.

Or https://www.thestampweb.com/albums/free-downloads which includes an eclectic mix of free albums, many done by different people so don't necessarily have a consistent look.

In both cases, however, the albums can be downloaded as PDFs or as AlbumEasy files for easy customisation.

Clive

Good news! My 4 CD set arrived today. Fast shipping, arriving 3 days after auction close and payment. I'll update after I form an impression.

Ok, that didn't take long. I have only looked at a couple album pages so far, but I have info. Algeria was interesting to me since I mentioned the space for a "ghost" stamp in most Scott Part 2's I've seen. That space is not on the second page, here, and I can use the image in that discussion. Pages for Algeria from the beginning (I started with the second page here) to 2001. I've provided some reduced-size images that should illustrate the point while not infringing on any copyrights:



Initial observations: Page was scanned slightly skewed. These are real stamps mounted to a page, so as is clear in the second image, stamps are higher and lower and sometimes slightly crooked. I read "crooked" in someone's review but here it is. Note that both pages have "extras" mounted in the white space. You might be tempted to cut them out with an editor, but the first page's examples are over the top border so you'd have to cut/paste another section to clean it up. Things like that sometimes don't look right. And as someone mentioned, with the stamps in the scans being full-size, mounting a stamp over the image would be problematic, particularly if you like to keep your lines straight.

In all, these will not work as album pages for me, even for later years. Obviously the per-disk price for my set was low AND I see that these might make for a great reference over time. For me, that is what this is .. a reference set. We'll see how useful they are long-term.

Still have to peek at the digitized book set, and the album page software. My expectations are managed.

Does anyone recognize the border for these pages. I'd guess Scott Specialty, but there are other album MFGs and I do not know.

They appear to be Scott Specialty pages, yes.

I just had the perfect place to try to use the images as a reference. In moving stamps from a Falkland Islands collection in Scott International pages, I found I had a copy of the earliest of 1/2 cent A1s. Alas, there are 2 colors for this denomination; #9 is green, #10 yellow-green. Looked green to me. But I couldn't say for sure without seeing a #10.

I went to eBay and then StampsToGo. There were images, but almost all were of the green example. But wait! These scanned album pages will help. I can see both stamps in context of a single page!

There are no pages for Falkland Islands on these disks! This attempt at using them as a reference == FAIL.

I mounted it in the spot for #9 green but will be happy to correct later, if need be. Part of my reluctance To Believe was that the the earlier example is slightly more pricey than the later one and coming from a more-generic page?

This brings up a question on color references, but that's for a new topic.