How to Create a Family Calendar with Digital Photos

Photo calendars are great for displaying your favorite photos and to keep track of the birthdays and anniversaries of your dear ones. They also make terrific gifts to your friends and family. A thoughtfully designed photo calendar can also help you keep track of your appointments and bills.

Making a family photo calendar is a fun project for kids and adults alike. All it takes is a little ingenuity and creativity to personalize a calendar. Here are some ideas for a custom digital photo calendar project.

With a simple program like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop you can design a wall calendar, a desk calendar or a CD case calendar for free and personalize it. You can also buy software to design calendars. A lot of free templates can be found online too.

Templates typically leave the top part of a sheet empty to fill in with art work and photos and have the dates at the bottom. You can realign the dates to be on the right or the left side of the calendar for alternative designs.

With so much flexibility, you can begin your calendar with any month you choose. You can customize the theme for each month individually - you can have a backdrop depicting the month's climate or some nice artwork.

Once you have the theme worked out, drag and drop your digital photos on each sheet of the calendar. You can place a single photo or a collage of photos on each sheet. Select photos for each month based on someone's birthday or anniversary or a festival like Thanksgiving or Christmas or pictures from where you have been in a previous year or will be for a vacation that month.

Include pictures of your ancestors and family history - this will be a great way to keep old memories alive and to bring warmth in your relations with an extended family.

Always use high resolution digital photos for your calendar. At 4-5 megapixels in resolution in recommended. Use the raw format to store the photos your shoot with a digital camera - unlike file formats like JPEG, the raw format preserves all details in the photo without compressing it or altering the colors and tones.

You can also customize the days of special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, Mother's day, Valentine's day with a photo of the respective family member or with a simple note or with pictures of cake, wedding ring, etc.

If you want more utility value in your photo calendar, mark the days when your mortgage or other periodic payments are due. It will work very well as a reminder to pay your bills on time.

As your work on your software, preview the calendar often and adjust the elements to have the most visually appealing design. You can also email a digital version of your personalized photo calendar to your family and get their suggestions for adding things to it before you print.

Use high quality photo paper to print your calendar sheets when your design is complete. You can punch holes and run a plastic binder through the sheets of your calendar or use services of a store to get this done.