MacMost Now 634: Creating Printable Calendars in iPhoto

There's a lot you can do with the calendar creation feature in iPhoto 11. You can use your own photos and iCal calendars to order a printer calendar from Apple, or print it yourself. You can also export the pages from a calendar to a PDF or even create an image from it.

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

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at printable calendars with iPhoto.
So in iPhoto you have the ability to create calendars from your photos. You can start by, say, selecting a bunch of different photos and once you've got those ready to go you can then click on "create" at the bottom and select "calendar." *And so quickly take the photos that you've selected and throw them together in a calendar. You get to choose from a few different styles. Uh, we can move around in here. Let's choose the classic style for instance and hit "create." We get to pick when the calendar will start and number of months and also things that can be shown on the calendar. For instance you can choose U.S. national holidays if you wanted or for another country. You can also choose items on your iCal calendars. So you can actually create a special iCal calendar just for the items you want to appear in a printed calendar and then choose that. You can also select birthdays from your address book. So let's actually, uh, have this thing start in December 'cause maybe if you're gonna give a calendar as a present you'd want it to start, uh, right away, but we can have it go, say, thirteen months so it'll go all the way through next December. And click "ok" and it'll create the calendar and you see it's gonna fill in all these photos that I selected. Now I didn't select enough to fill in everything here, um, but I can edit each individual one. So let's double click here on the December calendar and I can choose the layout style--one photo, several photos--and I can choose the scaling for it and I can do all sorts of customizations to this photo. I then, I can go back to the layout and it'll appear here on the right. Choose all sorts of different things like say a background color for that image there. Go back to "all pages" here and select another. So, for instance, I'm using up three photos here. Maybe I'll switch to a one-photo layout. Therefore I can use those other pictures somewhere else. Let me choose this one here. A lot of customization options for each individual page. Now, once you have finished your calendar, you can click on "buy calendar." You can create great gifts or just something for yourself to have. But you could also export these, kinda. You wanna go to "print"--file, print here--and you can print your calendar. Now, you've got a ton of different options because, uh, there are a ton of different ways to print it. You can see this is going to be 28 pages. That includes, like, the front and the back and then the top and the bottom portions of each page are going to be a separate printable page. So if I just page through it I can see there's the top of December and there's the bottom of December. So the interesting this is if I wanted to, say, just create maybe a quick printout for a calendar I could stick on my desk or on my wall, uh, and I just want it to be basically this--just December--um, I can do that just by going to "show details" then selecting I just want to print from page three to three. And you can see I can just print this one out. I get something that's like this actually, uh, just a single page. So it's kinda neat that you're, you can do that. Create these quick little printable calendars that look really nice especially if you have a color printer. Um, and you can also scale them and try all sorts of different things. And another thing of course you can do is you can export using the PDF function. You can save as a PDF or say just open in preview. So I've selected to only have page three here, which is the December calendar, go to preview. It's gonna open Preview up and there I've got this one single page, it's a PDF now, of December. From here I can even export it further. So say if I wanted to create a screen background that was the month of December I could actually export it in format jpeg. I'd create a nice, high-quality one by upping the resolution. So if I did 300 pixels per inch, I'm gonna get a really high resolution, uh, jpeg that then I can use as my backdrop or use in some other program. 
So while all these creative tools inside of iPhoto are geared toward having you order these products and get them through the mail, you could also print them yourself. If you have a good printer you can come up with something pretty good or you could export them as a PDF and then take them somewhere, like a local copy center, and print them from there or you can do different things with them like, say, just printing a single page out of them for your own use. So there's a lot of versatility there. So take a look at the calendar function inside of iPhoto and play around with it and see if it's something you can use. 'Til next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 634: Creating Printable Calendars in iPhoto”

Sonny Z

13 years ago

Hi Gary... Just want to say this was fantastic video!!!!! Definitely know what to send out for Christmas gifts this year!!!!! Thank you so much for helping out the Mac community with these great insights!!!!

Roger

Will the first page have pictures on both sides of the paper?
The next piece of paper, the calendar page for January will have the dates on one side and the picture for February on the reverse and so on throughout the year?
Can a home based printer, say a HP Office Jet with duplex capability, be able to print all the pages in a sensible manner?
By sensible I mean that when the calendar is assembled nothing will be upside down.
You wouldn't know if there are inexpensive tools to punch holes and attach the wound wire at the top would you?
If I'm going to make this at home with my own paper and printer I would like to make the WHOLE calendar from beginning to end.

Gary Rosenzweig

That answer depends on your printer. I guess if you have a nice printer capable of printing on both sides of the page you can do that.
You'll probably need to experiment to see if you can get it to work the way you want.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 634: Creating Printable Calendars in iPhoto

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 634: Creating Printable Calendars in iPhoto”

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