101 iPhotos

I am waiting for my first ever iPhoto calendar made from 101 of our own photos to arrive... Should be cool!

Here's how you can do it too:

• Open up iPhoto on your Mac
• Create a new album
• Put all the pictures you want on the calendar into this new album
• Select the album (click on it) so you can see just the photos you've gathered
• Click the "Calendar" button on the bottom toolbar in the middle
• Choose one of the styles in the list that pops up and click "Choose"
• Choose from various calendar-y settings in the next dialog and click "OK"
• Click "Autoflow" to let iPhoto place the pictures for you
• Or, drag and drop photos from list view to calendar (or vice versa) to add or remove them
• Drag and drop photos from one place to another on the calendar to swap them around
• You can even drop photos onto specific days to use a few more photos
• When you're done fiddling with it...
• Click "Buy Calendar" and pay $25-$30 for your custom calendar to be delivered straight to you

You need around 50 or so photos in the album if you are going to use the "Autoflow" button to let iPhoto choose/place the pictures for you. Using Autoflow on a typical 12 month calendar, it seems to consistently use the first 47 photos. You need more if you want to put different photos onto individual dates, or if you change the default layout of some months to use more photos.

I added a bunch more photos and changed most of the months to use the smaller print area 7-photo layout because most of my photos are from my old 3 Megapixel camera. iPhoto will warn you with a little yellow triangle "!" if the photos are going to print with "too low" a resolution. I did a few of those anyway, hoping that they don't look too chunky when we see the final print job.

All of these instructions are valid with iPhoto '08, version 7.1.5 (378) - I will wager that they are still valid with iPhoto '09, too, but I haven't looked at that version yet. If you're using an older version, I'm not sure if this works or not. I do not know what version of iPhoto introduced these books and calendars that you can buy... It might be just '08 and later.

I put just my immediate family's birthdays onto the calendar and a little photo of each of us on the day just before our birthdays. I would have done that for all my extended family, too, but I wanted to get the calendar done before the year was up... :-)

I also just wanted to put a bunch more photos on than there was room for, so I put 'em on those useless dimmed out squares that represent the days of the previous and next months, too.

In the end, I paid $29 and change for ours to be shipped express to us so we'd have it by early next week. With standard shipping, it would have been $26.xx. I figured since we're a week into January already, it was worth an extra three bucks.

Try it yourself... after it arrives, you'll be able to enjoy it all year long.

Have fun!