I usually create a family picture calendar each year for ourselves and each of our family members. I started the tradition some years ago when I would create individual pages and print them in color on my ink jet printer. I would then hand assemble the pages and take them down to Staples to have them bound. Last year I used an online service which worked rather well but it took a lot of time uploading individual pictures and it was hard to see how it really would look. This year I decided to try the iPhoto program on my Mac. It was the slickest experience ever for creating a calendar.

I first went through all the 2007 photos I had and selected about ten times more than I would eventually use. For each month you can select a template from 1 to 7 photos. The photos I had preselected all appear in a bar on the left and you just drag them to the picture area. You can add any text to the calendar portion. When we were all satisfied, we just clicked the Buy Button. It assembles everything and uploads to Apple for printing. This screen shot shows what it looked like inside iPhoto (click to enlarge)

Categories: Photo Software
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I in the processing of creating several blog entries at our family blog for our recent vacation to Europe.  We went on a cruise with some friends and they wanted to know how to get a copy of the entry.  I had not thought about that before being a peson who has evolved to hardly ever printing anything and doing most things online.  A little research showed a great Wordpress plugin called “wp-print” that did the trick.  You can add a link at the bottom of the entry that the viewer can click on get a print friendly view of the blog. This is much better than just using the browser to print since you would lose any styling from the CSS.

I doubt I will actually print things to paper, but I did experiment and used this method to create a PDF.  That is a great way to archive your blog entry.  Things online tend to disapear with time.  Who will keep up some blogs year from now.  If you are blogging as way to keep a history, this might be a good way.  Here is an example of a PDF I created for our visit to Florence.  I trimmed many of the pages from the PDF to reduce the file size since this is only for illustration purposes since the full 13 pages, with photos, produced a 7.5 mb PDF file. Florence and Pisa Blog PDF

Want to try it out, click the link below for this blog entry.

Categories: Blogging
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While we were visiting Sara I grabbed her 2007 photos on a small external hard drive I had. She had arranged them in folders with folder names for each event. When I brought them into iPhoto each folder was added as an event and the event name was set to the folder name. Real neat! Each event in iPhoto shows up in reverse chronological order (I set for the most recent on the top). This is what it looks like for part of the iPhoto screen. In iPhoto I just click any event to see all the photos inside, but don’t try this on this website since this is not iPhoto, just a screen capture of it.

Click the image below to view full size.

Categories: Photo Software, Photography
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