printing calendars

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

Old Toad was right. You don't need Mimeo (or any other extension) to print (at least) a Calendar project. I tested this today. You can work on your calendar in Photos. Create a new Project and ignore the message to go to the app store for an extension. Click on Continue instead. All the functionality you had all along is there - except the "Buy Calendar" box is grayed out. That's okay. You're not going to need it. Instead, export your project as a .pdf file when you're done. Copy this to a flash drive and take it to a local Print Center. I took mine to the UPS Store and they said they could do the printing and the spiral binding for less than $20 per calendar. Sounds like a deal to me.

Just the same, having lost three days sorting all this out, I too am ****** off.

That depends on how you want to use the events boxes.

What I do is make my own composite photo including my own text box leaving room in the upper right hand corner for Shutterfly to populate the date field. When I drop this into the event bucket in Shutterfly, the default is for Shutterfly to place the date in the upper right corner in black. Once you figure out how to do it, you can change the color of that text to white. But you can't get RID of the that number in a date event. UNLESS you put your photo in one of the boxes before the first date of the month or after the last date of the month. Those boxes won't have any Shutterfly text in them. (In July 2019, there will be one blank event box before July 1, and three after July 31).

If you just want to mark an event with text, go ahead and use Shutterfly's Event options to do so. If you plan to include a graphic, be aware that the bottom half can be obscured it you use the translucent text background.

To take charge of that translucent text background, I create my own in the composite before uploading to Shutterfly. See below.

Hope that helps.

Good luck.

My workflow is a little different. I can work in either Photos or iPhotos because my data resides on my desktop PC. When I'm working on a project like this, I select the photos I want to use on my PC, tweak them in Photoshop, then copy them to a flash drive and import them into Photos or iPhoto. I disliked the database setup in iPhotos, and long ago made the decision that I'd stick with my PC and the excellent file management program (Directory Opus) I use.

So, I don't need to migrate between Apple programs. When I'm done with a Photo or iPhoto Project I can delete it and start from scratch on the next project. I haven't deleted any project yet because I have had occasions where I've needed to reprint one.

Things might have been different had I committed to iPhoto's facial recognition piece. Having compared that with Google's (now unsupported, gee isn't that a familiar theme?) Picasa. Having done the work to identify faces on 20,000 photos, and having learned that there's no migration tool available to move from Picasa to iPhoto or Photo (****, not even to Google's Photos - talk about betrayal!), I am committed to the status quo. Like léonie, I'll keep Picasa, Windows 10, and my last paid for version of Photoshop CS5 on a dedicated PC that will never again be connected to the internet. (no potential updates to sabotage my tools).

Bottom line, I don't use my MacBook to manage my photo libraries, so I'm free to choose between Photo an iPhoto or whatever replacement Apple comes up with next - as long as the tools still provide some measure of functionality (like still being able to export a .pdf file).

As far as iCloud integration is concerned, I'm old school. I'll manage my own data and backups, thank you very much - partly out of privacy concerns, partly because, as a former coder, I simply prefer to maintain control over, and partly because I've burned in the past when companies I invested time and effort into suddenly went belly-up. Promises of life time warranties don't mean squat when a company goes bankrupt. (Remember Music Match? How about Kodak Gallery? to name just two. I didn't think so...)

Don't get me wrong, I do love my MacBook Pro. I spent 3 times what I could have paid for any of a number of Windows based PCs, just because I think the Mac's touchpad is vastly superior to anyone else's. Still, I use the Mac primarily as my travel PC in Boot Camp running Windows 10 and a recent copy of my data on board.

Well enough dawdling and diversion, back to the calendar project at Shutterfly - only 4 months left to go. shouldn't take more than a week...

The only reason I own a MacBook Pro is because Kodak Gallery went belly-up and Shutterfly, who Kodak endorsed as their replacement, didn't (and still doesn't) offer the large format calendar I had been used to doing. My brother in Germany had been sending me Apple calendars for years, so I bought the MacBook Pro specifically to make my own custom calendars. That was a $3300 investment, which may now be a boat anchor. Thank you very much Apple...

For what it's worth, I printed as many as 36 a year to give as gifts to the extended family/

Walgreens.com's large format calendar showed promise, but after Photoshopping a dozen photos to populate the detail boxes for January and uploading these to their site, I learned that I can't populate non-date detail boxes, those that don't have a date number in the upper right hand corner. I've been filling these extra spaces on calendars with older photos from the same calendar month. Now I have to go back to the Mimeo product to see if they have that limitation. An entire day wasted. The detail boxes in Mimeo are a different size, so I have to re-photoshop all the work I did yesterday. Again, Thank you very much Apple!

Thanks for listening.

Have a good one.

Ahah! I see what you mean. I can create calendar project using Photos directly instead of the subpar extensions Apple dished up. Though I can't buy a calendar from Apple anymore, I can still export one to a pdf file. ...worth pursuing for NEXT year. I've already put together January through May in Shutterfly and the effort involved for me to reformat all the photos, which are sized to fit the Shutterfly dimensions, is more work than I care to deal with - given I already have 4 solid days of work in that project.

I'll have to go the nearest Print Center with some samples to see how I like their spiral bound calendar options and whether the 13x10 format is even available.

Thanks for the tip.