Lesson 4: Mountin' Them Fine Pictures - Flush Mounts

Understanding how photographs are mounted into albums is one of the most important decisions you'll have to make when choosing your albums. Mounting can be defined as the method used to adhere a photograph to a medium. In the case of albums, photographs are usually adhered to paper. Remember these things?

Yup, these were the dreaded corner mounts. I hated these things because they never stuck to my backing and the pictures never stayed in place!

There are dozens of ways a photograph can be printed and mounted. Thankfully, album makers don't use corner mounts. However, album vendors have been known to mount their photographs differently, calling each process by different names. Because I feel that this topic is so important to understand, I'm going to break this subject into a few lessons. Today, I'm going to focus on flush mount.

Generally, there is one standard definition for flush mount - printing a single image and mounting it completely (or flush) to the backing of the company's choosing. I use the term "backing" losely but for albums, it refers to the thick card stock that are bound together to make the album leaves or pages. The singular image is likely to be a digital, printed image and may contain multiple pictures. Depending on your album maker, they may choose to print and mount an entire spread...like so...

...or cut your spread into two and mount the pictures as two pages. (Remember the gutters?)


Either way, the picture will be firmly adhered to the backing (usually thick card stock) - hence the term "flush" mount.

Also, don't be fooled - there are two types of flush mount albums - those that are mounted by the album company and those that you mount yourself. More on that next time...