Paperless Printables: a guide to using printable stickers in your digital planner

Hearing the word printable draws the mind straight to paper, but it doesn’t have to. Since printables are distributed as a digital file, you can keep it that way and snatch them straight into your digital sticker stash. In this guide I’ll show you how to use printables in your digital planner as well as the pros and cons of using this method.

To start off you’ll need to find some free printable stickers online. Here are some websites that have them:

http://planneraddiction.com/free-printable-planner-stickers/

http://robinprintables.blogspot.com/2016/09/free-printable-planner-stickers-weekly.html

https://lovefrommim.com/free-printable-planner-stickers/

https://plannerproblem101.com/

Once you have found a set that you like, you’ll need to download them. The type of file it needs to be for a sticker is an image file (JPG or PNG). Most of the listed websites above have JPG files available to download; however, some of these only offer PDF files. To use them, you’ll need to convert the file. Here’s how (for mac):

1. Open the file in preview

2. On the top menu bar, select file > export…

3. In the popup box, pick where you want the file to be saved, what you want it to be called, and in the format box below select PNG or JPEG

When you have your image file, you will need to transfer it to your device which your planning on. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m going to use an iPad with Good Notes as the example. To transfer your image file, you can use google drive, Drop Box, airdrop or email.

When you have it on your iPad, it should be saved to your camera roll. From there you’ll want to use the image tool and insert the photo of your stickers into a notebook separate from your planner. This could be a designated sticker book, or even a default Good Notes book. From here, the downfall of printables starts to surface.

Each time you’ll want to use a sticker:

1. Copy the page and paste it into your planner

2. De-select the image and then long press it. Another menu will pop up that says ‘edit’

3. Click edit > crop, and then crop the page to the sticker that you want to use

4. Re-size to your liking.

Now that we have detailed the process of using printables for digital planning, here are some of the pros and cons of it:

Pros

- Free

- Re-usable

Cons

- Can be a pain to crop

- Less variety

- More difficult to come by