I spent most of the morning uploading the rest of the pictures I am having printed for photo albums. A total of 612 photos with my first digital camera, through February 22nd of this year. I’m sure there may be a few more I toss when I go to put them in albums, but at a mere $0.12 cents a piece, I think I can handle it.
I spent most of the afternoon working on the pages for the calendar. I found this software over at Shutterfly where you can create collages. Of course, their intention is that you’ll buy stuff from them with the collages you make. And, perhaps someday I will. But for now, I’m enjoying the handy feature called “Export” where it makes a jpeg file of the collage you just made.
The software isn’t anything to crow about. It’s dreadfully slow – hit the wrong button and you’ll pay with at least 5 minutes of your time getting back to where you wanted to go. You ability to edit the collages doesn’t go beyond deciding which layout to use and how each picture you select fits in the particular layout (you can adjust left/right/up/down as well as zoom in and out). But, you cannot edit a collage once you navigate away from it.
And the little thumbnails they give you to select your pictures from are too small to see what they are. I worked back and forth between Picasa where I chose which pictures I wanted and Shutterfly Studio where I was assembling my collage. When you start a collage, you can select which folders you want to take photos from, but if your photos are scattered, it was easier just to Export using Picasa and then use that sole file to work from. I did the Export thing on about half of the pages, and when I was done, I wished I had done it on all of them. It would have made re-creating a collage much easier when I saw things I wanted to adjust later.
For now, this project is at rest. I’ll come back to it once I have time to mull over what I did and whether actually like the themes I chose. Ironically, I hand these calendars out to everyone and Steve takes one to work, but we never have one at home. By the time I’m done working on the calendar, I’m sick of seeing the pictures anyway so I never ask for an extra. When we go over to other people’s houses, I see them, of course. But when they come to visit us and mention the current picture, sometimes I have to think about what they’re talking about…but it only takes me a moment and I know. So in mulling over whether I like what I’ve done or not, I don’t really have anything to compare it to. I know that sounds really lame since I’ve been doing these calendars since Ben was born, but it’s true. [I guess Steve just tosses his at the end of the year. I know we don’t have any stashed anywhere.]
Okay, I’m rambling. Time to call it a day. We’re going to town tomorrow and I haven’t even planned all my stops yet. And I need to make a menu and a grocery list. Monday is the day I’m shipping gifts to Florida as well as the day Mom plans to ship the calendars and my Christmas letter to me along with our gifts. Must. get. busy. Monday will be here before I know it.