Creating a Family Calendar

It’s become a bit of a Christmas tradition for us now. Every year I give the family a gift of a calendar based on photos of the previous year. It doesn’t actually take too long to do thanks to the built in calendar creation tool in iPhoto. I use iPhoto to manage my photographs anyway so all of my photos are already in its database.

All I need to do is make a smart album that only displays photos from a certain year. If I’m creating a calendar for 2014, as I was this year, then I select photos from 2013. I do have to cheat a little as this is a Christmas present so I’m usually making it towards the end of November. This means there are no photos from December of that year so I have to go back to 2012 for the photos for the final month.

The main problem though is choosing which photos to leave out as there are always too many to choose from. I like to add a nice selection of scenery, events, artistic photos, portraits and the odd silly photo so that we have a nicely rounded calendar reminding us what we got up to the previous year. We tend to be creatures of habit so often we are doing similar things each year to those depicted on the calendar making it somewhat predictable. Even so, it’s a nice keepsake to have and one that I’ve been doing for a few years now so we have a little collection of them. You can download a copy of our 2014 calendar here.

2014 Calendar

2014 Calendar

I know I could produce these family calendars more cheaply using other printers such as vista print and that they even have software to help you do it, but we’ve been impressed with the quality of the Apple product in the past so I tend to stick with what I know. They aren’t cheap but it’s worth it to hang memories on the wall that we see every day for the next 12 months.

1 Response

  1. Avatar forComment Author mum says:

    Lovely photos, but what are you doing Al in Dec, wearing pants on top of your jeans? Thought it was usually on your head!

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.