[Pierre74]

Hi!

I am looking for an application to create photo calendars. What I want is full page calendars with one page/picture per month.

I use my best pictures of the past year to make calendars as X-mas gifts for the family. Up to now this has been scisors and glue work. I hope to step up to all digital this year.

A search on Versiontracker brought up very little. Nothing decent actually.

Any suggestions welcome.

TIA
Pierre

[Randman]

Pages + iCal + iPhoto. In fact, you can check out the iCal print calendar options to see if you even need Pages.

[Randman]

Open iCal, select Print and save as a PDF. Then create a page in Pages (or use a template), import the calendar and whatever photo you want. Print, or take it on a flash drive or something to a Kinko's or somewhere and have them print and bind it for you.

[Randman]

Ok, here's a quick and dirty one I did (it took about 5 minutes) as an example. Pretty easy.

[bbales]

Randman -- What size is that? What I mean is, is that 2 separate pages of 8 1/2 by 11 paper?

I do a calendar every year for my family and I end up using several programs, including the VERY old "CalendarMaker" program for the calendar pages. If nothing else, you just helped me out on the calendar section, with the idea of using ical, instead. Never throught of that, I'm ashamed to admit.

By the way, Pierre, to create my calendar, I use PageMaker (though now I have InDesign) for the photos -- I make a whole collage for every month and print all those pages out, then print the calendar pages out separately, then take the whole mess to Kinko's for binding. It's extremely labor-intensive, but they're a big hit.

[Randman]

It's a little smaller than a normal 81/2 x11 sheet of paper.

If I were going to do it for real, I might use a different app than Pages (such as ID) but Pages does work well. I just used a blank template and dragged the two items onto it. With a formatted template, you could make it much fancier.

[kcmac]

You can set up the page size to be anything you like in Pages.

When you import the Calendar into Pages, do you have the ability to scale up that image? Does it look okay?

Randman, you are a genius.

Edit: Okay, I just tried it. Went to File>Page Setup>Paper Size> Manage custom sizes.

Then you set up the size you want and save it. Now go back to your document and go back to Page setup and click on the paper size you setup earlier.

The calendar scales perfectly.

Looks like we may have a homemade Christmas project here in our house as well.

[Mediaman_12]

In theory this is something Apple could place in iPhoto.
Put in a 'Calendar' option, (make it work similar to the 'Book' Feature). Select a photo album and one (or more) calendars from iCal, chose from a few well designed templates. They could even put in a 'send away for Professional Printing' button like the books. You would have various options (Wall hung, Stand up desk calendar etc.). I think it would be a fairly popular feature.

[allblue]

This has been a very interesting thread for me as I am intending to make a calendar for the first time, using my own artwork and giving personalised versions to everyone for Christmas (gosh won't they be thrilled!) In the prototype I have laboriously created a grid in Photoshop - like Pierre I never thought of using iCal - so that could be a big time saver for me, thanks for the tip Randman. The question I want to ask here is there anywhere to download localisations for iCal including National Holidays etc? I need to make them for both the UK and Portugal so it would be a double save for me.

[Randman]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ical/library/

http://www.icalshare.com/

[allblue]

Hey Randman you are on the ball! Thanks very much! Unfortunately the icalshare link won't work for me... I'll try again later.

[Randman]

Yeah, it looks down but it was up a few days ago so maybe it's just borrowing the MacNN database for a few hours.

[allblue]

I took the slighly less lazy option and did an alltheweb search (superior to Google IMHO) and found this site:
http://www.qppstudio.net/index.htm
- although not downloadable it is all here! I now know that Tuesday March 8th 2006 is Tsagaan Sar (Lunar New Year) in Mongolia and it lasts two days. Sounds fun!

[Boondoggle]

www.ofoto.com

I think it is called kodak easyshare now.

[Pierre74]

Not an application, but a web service that I will try: www.photobox.co.uk

[bbales]

OK Randmann, a question. I am working on my photo calendar, but cannot figure out how you did what you did. I can't drag and drop a calendar into pages, or whatever. Could you be a little more specific as to how you created your example above. I'm sorry to be dumb -- I'm sure I'm missing something easy, but I'm having trouble with icalendar. (And by the way, if I create a blank calendar, I can get one without any writing already in it, correct?)
Thanks.

[kcmac]

Originally Posted by bbales

OK Randmann, a question. I am working on my photo calendar, but cannot figure out how you did what you did. I can't drag and drop a calendar into pages, or whatever. Could you be a little more specific as to how you created your example above. I'm sorry to be dumb -- I'm sure I'm missing something easy, but I'm having trouble with icalendar. (And by the way, if I create a blank calendar, I can get one without any writing already in it, correct?)
Thanks.

When you create your iCal calendar as a pdf, open Pages.

Go to the menubar.

Insert>Choose>select your iCal pdf.

[Randman]

In iCal, select Print. Then from the options menu, select Save As PDF. Then in Pages, all you have to do is drag the PDF onto a template and you're good to go.

Yes, you can use a blank calendar though it's a nice touch, I think, to add US holidays (or anything else you may want). You can get those for free via Apple.com/ical or icalshare.com.

[bbales]

Thanks for the quick responses. I usually add holidays, plus family birthdays (in 2006 alone, we have someone hitting 40, 50, 80, plus 16 and 18) on my calendar. I've created a sample, just to see how it works -- could NOT figure out how to make it into a pdf, and it's not in the help file either, so thanks for that. Haven't made a template yet -- that's my next step. I'll experiement today with both Pages and InDesign, to see which I like. How'd you do that, by the way -- the calendar has to have the picture on the top, then the calendar page on the bottom. Was that hard?

Thanks again. Every year I wonder why I do this, and this year is no exception. But the finished product really is nice, and it's fun to gack through the earlier ones to see how my girls have changed.

[bbales]

OK, I'm not sure if this is the easy or "right" way, but I created a document in InDesign, then copied just January and pasted it into the appropriate place. I'm not sure if you can import the whole calendar, b/c then I'm not sure the months line up to the right pages. This seems to be working -- I'll have to figure printing out later.

Thanks Randman and kcmac, for your help. any other tips would be welcome.

[bbales]

Randman, you ARE a genius! I created a calendar document (I suppose it's a template of sorts) and pasted in a couple months, then threw in my pictures, set duplex printing and I have a calendar! I think I'll follow an earlier suggestion, when I'm done, and just export the whole thing as a pdf and take it to Kinko's. I feel like I've just gotten about 20 hours of my life back, just from the feeding through and printing 7 calendars page, by page, by page, using three separate programs and hours and hours of time.

This is fabulous. I'm so excited.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by bbales

Randman, you ARE a genius! I created a calendar document (I suppose it's a template of sorts) and pasted in a couple months, then threw in my pictures, set duplex printing and I have a calendar! I think I'll follow an earlier suggestion, when I'm done, and just export the whole thing as a pdf and take it to Kinko's. I feel like I've just gotten about 20 hours of my life back, just from the feeding through and printing 7 calendars page, by page, by page, using three separate programs and hours and hours of time.

This is fabulous. I'm so excited.

Isn't this what makes forums so great?!

[bbales]

Originally Posted by Appleman

Isn't this what makes forums so great?!

Without question. When I've had issues (real-life example from a couple years ago: how do I get a PC notebook to see my wireless network?) I just type do some searching around on these and other forums and nearly always get a good answer. Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.

[Randman]

Good to hear. And thanks for the idea as well. The missus and I are thinking of doing one up now as well for our folks and our desks at the office.