Creating Photo Calendars On Your Mac

You can create calendars in the Photos app that use your photos as the pictures. You can customize each month to include one or more photos, plus captions. You can also specify the items to be included on each date by using your own calendars. When done, you can order the calendars from Apple or print them yourself.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: It's the time of year when you look for a new calendar for next year or you get calendars to give as holiday gifts. You can create your own using the Photos app on your Mac. It's pretty easy to do and of course it's special because you get to use your own photos for it. It's really not that expensive. So let's look at how to do it. 
So I'm going to start here with an album. I'm already in an album called vacation. I have all these photos here. Starting with an album means that I'll have a whole bunch of photos that I can automatically populate the calendar with. I don't have to stick with those photos. I can add more. I can bring more in from other albums and other places and all of that. But it's good to have a starting point. 
So I'm in this vacation album here and I'm going to go to My Projects here in the left sidebar. Hit the plus button and then select Calendar. Now it's going to ask me a few questions first. First, how many months do I want. You can do twelve months which makes sense. But you can also do thirteen say if you want people to be able to start using the calendar right away in December 2017. You can have that month there as well. You can do fourteen months with an extra month going into 2019. That kind of thing. Then you set what the month is that it starts on. So I'm going to hit continue. 
Now I get to select a calendar type. It gives you a short description here. Now if you really want to get creative and choose the perfect one it's probably best that you try one and then you can easily delete that calendar and try another one. Kind of get used to which ones are the ones that fit your style. So let's choose this one here called, it's just called Modern Lines. There are a few of them called that. I'm going to select it and click Create Calendar. Then it's going to create the calendar. It's going to give me a warning here that it wasn't able to use all the photos because I didn't provide the exact number of photos I needed. Which is okay cause I'll work on that. 
Now I've got all thirteen months shown here and everything is filled in. At the bottom I've got a list of photos. This is a list that shows all of the unused photos. So all the ones that it used it put in here and all the ones it didn't use it stuck down at the bottom. I can switch to have it show the ones that it has used instead. I can also click the Add Photos button to add more to this list here at the bottom and I can clear all the displayed photos to start fresh. 
I can drag and drop from the bottom here to replace any photo here in any month very easily. So just do that and that way I can really quickly populate the calendar and get things looking the way I want. Also I can double click on any month and go into it. Now I have a little closer look at things so I could drag and drop in there as well. I can also click Options here and on the right I've got all these layout options. So I can choose from different layouts. So I can go anything from a single photo layout in this case or even one that takes up the entire page there to photos, you know, fitting four on a page. That kind of thing. So there's tons of layouts. These layouts depend on which style you've chosen. So there's some that actually have very few layout options and some that have a whole bunch like this one.
So you can choose from this. I can hit the Back button here. Other things I can do is I can rearrange the pages. So you select this little bar here at the bottom and drag and drop to switch them. Now, of course, it's not going to switch the month. It's switching the layouts. So if I wanted these two pictures, for instance, to be after these I can do that and you can see it's still February and March. So I'm just switching what layouts are shown there. 
Now you have some other options as well. The different layout styles depend upon what you've chosen. So I can go, for instance, to the back cover here and there's nothing to do with the back cover except that under Options I can choose to go from Blank to a single small photo. Again this depends on which calendar type you've chosen. I can even change the color here. So I can make it a different color. That's only available on the back cover. Then the front cover here has, under Options, the color it's going to use as the background there and I can choose from different styles here but not as many as I can on the internal pages. 
So you have lots of different things you can do depending on what you're choosing. You can also choose the color for the internal pages' borders for this particular calendar. For other you can't. Now you get to choose a few other options here. If you look at these buttons here, this button here is another way to bring up the layout options. 
But you also have this button here that you can change the months in the calendar. You can change to show national holidays for a certain country if you want. Show your birthdays from Contacts which is kind of fun. Or you can show specific calendars. So if you wanted specific dates on here you could create a calendar in the Calendars app, choose it here, and then it would show up there. So you could put all sorts of things, anything you want really. You can create a work calendar. You can create a calendar of special family events. You can download and subscribe to Calendar online since Calendars uses the standard format and bring in religious calendars. All sorts of things and then select those calendars then to appear here. So you have complete control over what appears in the dates as well. 
You can select whether or not to use the Apple logo on the back. You can also switch the theme to one of the other themes there. So I wouldn't do that while you're actually building a real calendar. I would do that while you're experimenting. For something like this you want to experiment first, play around with it, get to know the tool, and then start fresh when you think you know everything you need to know to build the calendar you want and build that calendar. 
Then you can click the Buy Calendar button. There's  Placeholder Text that's still here. I can review and I can go Continue. Add a shipping address, add payment information if you don't already have that through iTunes, and place the order. The great thing is you can order a bunch for yourself and give them as gifts. Or you can actually order one and have it sent to the person you want to send a gift to. 
So it's a great little option. A lot of fun to play with. Another thing you can do if you want is to print this calendar. So selecting it here on the left on the sidebar. You can go File, Print and you can print it out yourself if you have a really good printer at home and put it together yourself or at least preview it. You can also, of course, open it in Preview or Save as a PDF if you want to do that as well. So play around with the Calendar function. It could be useful this holiday season.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Creating Photo Calendars On Your Mac”

Lou Coppola

7 years ago

Most interesting and MOST helpful.
Thank you for all your efforts

Dr Mikey

Thanks Gary - brilliant as usual! Never used iPhoto because I always processed in Photoshop and stored in folders. Who needed the confusion of iPhoto?

But I recently decided to create a calendar (in iPhoto), submitted it last Sunday and it arrived on Thursday(!) - and the quality is amazingly good.

But never having used iPhoto or Photos I'm confused. What's the difference? Do you have a post that explains them?

Gary Rosenzweig

Mikey: iPhoto was a photo management app that Apple produced from 2002 to 2015. In 2015 Apple replaced it with a completely new app, called simply Photos. There are similarities, of course, since they both have similar functions. But iPhoto is obsolete and discontinued. Photos is the app supported now and Apple has been updating and improving it regularly.

Thanks Gary

Phyllis Steele

I just created a calendar after watching your video. I wouldn't even have thought of trying before watching the video, so thanks! The only question I have is why did I only have the option to add a label on one of the pages? I understand there's no room on full page photos, but it only offered a text box on the first of the pages with borders. I noticed you didn't add any labels on your sample in the video. I used a layout similar to the one you used.

Ignore my previous question. I just noticed a small line in one of the layout photo options and discovered that it's the one with the ability to add a label.

JoAnn Cowdin

I created a calendar and when I received it - I noticed the Month and year text is very small on each page. It's almost too small to read. I contacted Apple and was told that it was created that way by me. I asked how and was told "There is a chance you may have moved the days up slightly making the next default areas under the bottom right date." What does that mean? I tried to tart over and it happened again.

JoAnn: I'm with you. I don't see how you could have done that. You can do things with the pictures, but you can't really move the text on the calendar itself around.

Comments Closed.

Creating Photo Calendars On Your Mac

Comments: 8 Responses to “Creating Photo Calendars On Your Mac”

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