Does ANYONE know of a better alternative to the Mimeo Photos add-in to Apple Photos? Their Calendar Project replacement program leaves MUCH to be desired. I want to print the 10 1/2 x 13" calendars that I used to be able to setup and print through iPhoto and later Photos.
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.4), Pages
We're preaching to the choir, and are probably the only two people commenting on this...
If not, here's the latest. Mimeo Photos also does not allow you to populate event boxes that don't have a date number in them. (Example: Look at the Month of May 2019. There are three empty event boxes before May 1, and 1 after May 31. Those are four opportunities for displaying photos that are no longer there.) So, I ended up at Shutterfly.
I'm not a great fan of the 12x12 vs Apples 13x10.5 but in terms of real estate on a calendar page, Shutterfly not only has more square inches (144 vs 136), their event boxes are larger than what is now available in Mimeo Photos. (1.435 x 1.625" vs 1.5" x 1.25"), Their orientation is more suited to portraits vs Mimeo's landscape profile.
Neither Mimeo nor Walgreens allow you to change the font size or color for the date events. Shutterfly does. There's more editing flexibility built into Shutterfly than the others as well. The only things I don't like about Shutterfly are that,
a) their calendars will cost more,
b) the text box shading feature for an event can be turned off, but not adjusted in size. For me, this is not such a big deal because I create by own shaded text panels at the bottom of my composite date event pictures. My brother doesn't have that level of expertise and doesn't care to have the entire bottom half of an event photo obliterated by Shutterfly's text box. So, he's gone with Mixbook, another 12x12 format option, which I did not explore.
c) that I can't easily find background colors to match what I may have chosen in my 12x12" photoshopped composite photo for the top of the calendar page. It would be nice to have an eye-dropper feature to get you close to a color you're using elsewhere. Not a deal breaker, I use the eye-dropper in reverse. I sample Shutterfly's background color and use it as my background color.
There's a lot of test in the don't likes above, but they cons don't amount to much for me.
Shutterfly won my business, Mimeo and Apple lost. No MacBook Pro upgrade for me, since the primary reason for my having bought it in the first place is no longer a factor.
It's been a slice,
All the best
Because I'm not that familiar with how the Apple Boards work. I took a look at the post from Old Toad. He obviously has not worked on a Calendar Project. Mimeo's version stinks. If you ever worked on such a project in iPhoto or Photos, you'd know what I'm talking about. The other options are not satisfactory either. Hence my question.
Sad that Apple ash canned the class act program in favor of a less than mediocre external extension.
For what it's worth, the Walgreen's offering is the least odious alternative I've found.
Apple took one of the most compelling reasons to own a Mac (IPhoto/Photos) and have slowly eroded why it was so great at the start. Now the print products (that were seamless, well designed and beautiful) are relegated to third party apps with dismal ratings. They are here today but might be out of business tomorrow. It isn’t about user experience since Jobs is gone it is all about profit. It was compelling when “it just worked”.
BTW, don’t feel bad about “Boards”, they are not referenced by that name in Apple support. They are discussion communities that are specific to each product, both hardware and software. Good Luck.
I share your disappointment with the Apple decision to remove one of the capabilities that made it great. It is a sad day. If you decide to use the apps, they can only be used with version 10.13 of the OS so they are using it to force upgrades too. It has become like the Windows crap that most of us left behind. Every time they've done a recent "upgrade" they have removed or altered capabilities that a lot of users liked using. The Apple is definitely losing its shine and without Steve Jobs, no one running the show at Apple really cares. I don't think they use "it just works" any longer...
This is ******* me off too... I CAN'T download Mimeo because of an older OS (10.12.6) and can't go any higher. WTH did Apple have to go and take away a feature that worked well (well, the newer one didn't work as well as the old one, but it worked a lot better than the choices we have now). When someone comes up with a seamless way to do a calendar, LMK!!! 😕😠
I haven’t made calendars but I make a lot of photobooks. When the bugs started appearing with the Apple photobook layouts I moved to bob books uk and have found them fantastic, cheaper and more customisable than Apple photobooks. I see they offer calendars as well. Maybe when you get the time and energy you could see if the bob books software does what you want with regards to calendars. I find the support team are very responsive and you don’t just get canned email responses.
I see see your point re buying Apple for the Photos software. I did too. I was disappointed when it was clear they weren’t putting money into fixing the photobook problem. I mean they have a couple of hundred billion $s in cash reserves. Surely they could apply some of that to keep the Photos app current.
Unless Bob has the option to print on the other side of the Atlantic, I'll stick with geographically closer options, but thanks for the info.
For Photo Book projects, the options are many. Since I mostly put together my own composite pages in Photoshop, I don't need editing features for those, so any service that prints a nice looking hardcopy would suffice. I've used Shutterfly and Apple, and was very happy with the former's quality. No need to look elsewhere except for price. Thankfully, there are many competitors in this space, so not a problem. Calendars are a horse of another color.
Great! I still have iPhoto 9.6.1. So, I have the option of going back to an 13 x 10 calendar in 2019 (for 2020, since I'm too far along to want to restart this year's project) using export to .pdf and a third party Printer. That's wonderful.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Übrigens, ich stamme aus Frankfort, lebe aber jetzt in den USA
They are a labor of love. I spend about at least a week every year putting these family calendars together. Trust me, Photobooks are a better way to go, if you don't have a lot of time on your hands. I can't imagine creating completely individualized calendars, like the one you suggested, though they sound like they would be wonderful keepsakes though.
Another no-longer-supported tool (this one by Google) called Picasa makes finding photos by a person's name as easy as it gets - assuming you've been maintaining the database by names current. iPhoto's facial recognition feature provides the same functionality.
Have fun
Are you using both iPhoto and Photos, or are you just using iPhoto? I am ready to go back to iPhoto but am wondering if it can be done--or if I will lose all the photos from the past year that I added to Photos. This whole calendar thing is turning my head upside-down. On top of that I stubbed two toes, and don't feel like dealing with a whole lot at the moment!! 😕
It is not possible to downgrade a photos Library to iPhoto. We can share photos from Photos directly to Aperture, but not to Photos. But iPhoto can open my Aperture Libraries. I am using iPhoto mainly to open older iPhoto Libraries and to create projects - slideshows - books- cards. I am creating separate small new iPhoto Libraries for these projects, so I can archive them separately. It is much safer to have projects in separate libraries. Otherwise I might accidentally modify or delete photos that are used in the project. Photos can still not show the titles on a photo in a slideshow and has no way to use the metadata I assigned to the photos, so it is too tedious to use Photos for slideshows, and other project types are not supported natively in Photos any longer anyway.
For all other purposes I am sticking with Photos, because I am relying heavily on the iCloud integration and I like the ease to use the photo editing extensions.
Apple removed my post because it contained a "p***t**n or a p**l". I was trying to get them to see how many of us are disappointed (understatement) that the Calendars and Books feature was removed, and that Mimeo fell way short of our expectations. So I wrote to them in Feedback. You all should do the same. Let's see if they remove this as well.
😠
Thanks for putting up your workflow! I found it interesting to read. I’ve just kept doing the updates and migrated to Photos. On the whole I find it works for my photo collection (now 10,000 photos!) and I love being able to find photos on my iPhone when I’m out and about. The only thing I find that seems to be all over the show is the facial recognition function which gets worse with every update. If you keep things up to date with keywords etc I find the smart albums brilliant.
I digitised my late mother’s photo collection. Some 1500 photos. This would not have been manageable without Leonie’s script to change the dates of the scanned files. Thanks so much for putting that out there. I’ve also used your other scripts and advice on workarounds to find photos with no keywords etc.
Once I migrated away from the Apple photobooks and found a better solution I’m very happy. It took me several months of trialling other print offerings and now I wouldn’t look back. I‘m now on to setting up a private family photo sharing site. I tried smugmug but find it confusing so I’m going to try wix websites. Im going to try some calendars too :-)
Oh I am so sorry - I didn’t realize that. I have been disappointed since the news broke last summer and almost made all my calendars in September but hoped someone would come fill the void if I waited long enough. I have a MacBook Pro that is probably on the edge of not being compatible - but I really don’t want to get a new computer so I am hoping that I can get another few years out of mine. Again, my condolences - it’s so maddening.
Good to know, but will the events, appointments, birthdays and such that I put into the date part of the calendar come through too?
printing calendars
