Problem with pasting images

[Elay]

Hi Everyone,

I'm very new to digital scrapping and the Gimp. I'm learning all kinds of neat things to do, but I'm having a problem and wondered if I could get some advice.

When I copy and paste an image onto my background, they paste as different sizes. Like, the same image that pasted very large in one layout might paste super tiny in another layout. This isn't a huge issue until it comes time to do photos.
When I'm pasting my photos, a lot of the time, it pastes onto the background as huge! I mean huge! Then, when I scale the image down to fit (which is very time consuming since the image is so big), the resolution becomes lower and lower (which makes no sense to me). Is there anyway to control this? Has anyone else had this problem? I've looked and tried different things, but nothing seems to work. The photos become so low in resolution that it is recommended not to print them. These photos are starting out with high res. Also, they don't paste that way every time (even the same photo).

I hope this all made sense. Please tell me I'm not the only one and that there's something I can do to fix this.

Thanks in advance!
Elay

[nifty]

I'm not sure what is going on, I can't say I've ever had that happen.... but here is something to try. Instead of opening up the image and copying and pasting try this:

File> open> and find the file you're looking for. Instead of double clicking to open it just drag it into your document.
Then go to layer> scale layer and then you can adjust the size to whatever you need using either pixels or inches, whatever you feel comfortable with.
I hope that helps.

[Elay]

Thanks Nifty!
I tried draggin the images, and that didn't fix the issue. But, I didn't know you could do drag, so there's yet another thing that I've learned!

I finally figured out the problem, though. It's the backgrounds I was using. I happened to check the resolution on them and some of them are very low. So, when I would bring in my pics (high res), the ratio was such that the pics were much larger than the background. So now I am going through my backgrounds to weed out the ones with lower resolution.

Thanks again!

[nifty]

Oh and another thing that will help you is to always start with a blank 12x12" 300 dpi document and open everything else into that (or whatever size you want to scrap). It will make sure you never save into your backgrounds, your document is the right size and a number of other reasons.
If you have a decent megapixel camera your pictures will always be bigger than your scrapbook page