Have you ever wanted to turn your photos into a nice looking calendar for display? Or perhaps to give to friends and family as a gift? Well, this is all possible with some simple steps. Read on and find out how you can do this. It’s really quite a simple procedure – anyone can do it within one or two hours.

1. Select Good Photos
The first step in turning your photos into a calendar format is to select some good candidate photos. The trick is to select your favorite 12 to 15 photos and place them into a suitable folder. Usually, for such a selection you can go by themes, e.g. children, famous landmarks or even seasonal photos like winter or summer landscapes.

2. Clean Up Pictures
Once you’ve selected the photos, the next step is to have them cleaned up. Remove any dirt or noise from the photos using your favorite paint program. If need be, you can also apply special effects to the photos using filters like sepia for a more interesting look.

3. Ensure Photos Are Large Enough
You then need to make sure that the photos you selected are large enough. Typically, if you intend to produce 8×10 inch photos, you need to have 1600 x 1200 pixels of resolution. I’d say that a 3 megapixel camera or above will be more than enough to produce such shots.

4. Upload to Photo Sharing Site
The next step is to then upload those selected and cleaned up photos into a good photo sharing site. A good one is Smugmug which has options for printing photos into calendars. Usually the price of the calendar is not much, and you can choose to have it shipped to an address of your choice.

And that’s it! Now you know how to select photos and create a calendar for sharing with friends and family. A calendar with nice, memorable photos makes a perfect gift. So do try this idea out the next time you’re out of gift ideas. Good luck!

~Ramachandran Kumaraswami