Obtaining photographs was only the first step of an activity that required a great investment of skill, effort, and time. Once an album maker had collected photographs and removed any backing board, she carefully cut around the desired portion of the image. Judging from extant albums, there were several different approaches to cutting photographs: some collagists included entire cartes de visite in their designs, others eliminated the background but retained the whole figure, and still others excised all but the head.

The number of unfinished collages found in albums indicates that they were often works in progress (and that their producers may have moved on to other activities or responsibilities while making them). These partially completed pages also provide hints about the varied process of assembling a photocollage. In some cases, the album maker conceived and painted a watercolor design well in advance of the photographs, as evidenced by pages awaiting portraits to fill in pendants on a necklace or heads to top drawn bodies dancing at a ball. In other instances, rough pencil sketches around pasted-in photographs reveal how the images inspired the theme of the surrounding decoration. Some women saved photographs until they had a sufficient number to complete a planned page, while others apparently added them to their albums as they were received. It seems that some collagists carefully planned out their designs with advance sketches and tracing paper, followed by pencil drawings directly on the page, to be filled in with watercolors or gouache; others approached their images in a more free-form fashion, with little evidence of deliberation. Most designs seem to have been produced on pages already bound into albums (as shown by painting on top of the pages’ bindings), but some may have been collected as individual sheets and bound subsequently. By the end of the 1870s, enterprising album manufacturers began publishing albums with preprinted pages, cleverly borrowing and mass-producing aristocratic designs for a broader audience.

_{Georgiana Berkeley. Untitled page from the Berkeley Album, 1876/71. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Georgiana Berkeley. Untitled page from the Berkeley Album, 1876/71. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.}