I have been creating a family calendar for several years now, giving it to each of our kids at Christmas. Each year I pick some pictures from the past year and include them. I started out with a do it yourself approach where I would have actually printed the pages on my home printer, then take them down to the office supply store to have their wire bound.

Although I am a big user of Adobe Lightroom, and rarely use the iPhoto program that comes with the Mac, I gave it a shot last year in producing the family calendar. That turned out to be a great process and much easier than some of the online services I had tried. Right from within iPhoto, I am not only able to create the calendar but click a button to have it printed and mailed to me. In past years the calendar was only 8.5 x 11 in sheets, but this new one is much larger format and the quality is very professional.

I didn’t have to give it an second thought to use iPhoto once again to create the calendar but since two of my kids have digital SLR cameras and my daughter takes far more and much better photos of her family than I ever was able to do, I added a new approach. I created a photo gallery on Mobile Me for staging of all the photos. I had a title slide for each month, not to be included in the final product, but to help me sort the photos so I would have several candidates for each month. With our children living all around the country, I needed a method for them to easily give me their photos.

Then any in the family could use this gallery to upload their photos directly. Then using iPhoto 09, it was easy to drag the photos around inside the web gallery to get them sorted by month.

Between Anne and I, our four kids and our eight grand kids, we have birthdays on most all of the months of the year. I grouped the images so those who had a birthday in a particular month could see the pictures of themselves on that month.

Next step was to use iPhoto to create the calendar. I just selected the Mobile Me gallery and clicked the create calendar button. I did not even have to download the photos to my local hard drive. I selected the Picture Calendar format to use, which has a photo page on the top sheet and a calendar on the bottom. ON screen I could work which each month and all the images from the Mobile Me Gallery on the left side. I started out with the cover page and picked an image to include and changed the title.

Then for each month, I would first enter any birthdays on the calendar portion (I had it insert the US holidays when I first started). Then for the top picture portion, I would first select a layout, from 1 to 7 images. Then it was a simple matter of dragging the photo from the left bar into one of the image placeholders. If I wanted to try some other photo, I just dragged it over and it replaced my first attempt. Once inside the placeholder you can zoom and pan the image if you wish.

When Anne and I were happy with the final results, I clicked the Buy Calendar button at the bottom. The cost was about $20 per calendar, plus shipping. I will get them in time to hand out to the kids at Christmas time.

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Our daughter, Sara, has started a new new photoblog called “Sara’s 100 Days of Photos“. Every day she posts a new photo with information on how it was taken and the camera settings.  I love the idea but am not sure I would have the discipline to post a new photo every day. Wonder if I could just collect 100 photos and then post one of them each day.  It is a great idea to get more involved with photography.

Here is just one example of her work that I really like.  With the blurred background and the composition of the photo, tipping the camera at an angle changes this from a good photo to a great photo.

Photo was taken with a Nikon D80, f/5.6, 1/60 sec., ISO-100, 175 mm

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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)

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