DIY Calendars on a Mac

Since we are in the last month of 2014, many of us may be looking for 2015 calendars either for personal use or to gift to a friend or family member.  While many companies allow you to upload your photos and customize your own calendars, there are do-it-yourself options that can save you a lot of money.  Additionally, given that many online calendar services have very clunky tools, the do-it-yourself options may also save you a lot of time.  In this post, I will discuss 2 different options for making your own calendar on a Mac and a budget (note the application of zeugma here).

Option #1: Calendar with Photos

Assuming that you bought your Mac within that last several years, you likely already have iPhoto installed.  If you don't, then you can probably find the installer on your backup/installation disc.  And if that option fails, then you should be able to download iPhoto from the App Store for free (or possibly for a small price, depending on which version of Mac OS X came with your Mac--I have not verified this recently, as Apple's policies may have changed and they may be offering free downloads for any version of Mac OS X).

Making photo calendars in iPhoto is very simple and intuitive, so at the risk of overstating the obvious, I'll briefly walk you through the process.  Start by making sure you have imported photos into your iPhoto library if you don't already have them stored there.  If importing photos exclusively for making a calendar (eg, you store your photo originals somewhere other than iPhoto), make sure you import at least 13 photos--that's one photo for each month, plus one for the front cover.  Import more photos if you want to put one on the back cover and/or if you want to insert multiple photos per month and/or if you want your calendar to have more than 12 months.

Once you have your photos imported, make sure they are all stored in the same event, select the event, and then select File > New Calendar.  That's really the hardest part.  From there, you enter a calendar wizard that guides you through selecting a theme, inserting national holidays and/or personal calendar events/birthdays, editing layouts, dragging and dropping photos onto existing layouts, etc. While Apple gives you an option to buy the calendar (they will print, bind, and ship to you), I prefer to print out my calendars on regular letter-sized paper using my laser printer, and I get great results.

If you prefer to print your calendar at your local print shop, just "print" your calendar to a PDF file.  All versions of Mac OS X have PDF technology (Quartz) built in, so you can select File > Print, and from the Print dialog box, select PDF > Save as PDF.  From there, copy your PDF file to a USB drive (or upload it to your local print shop if that's an option) and off you go.

Option #2: Calendar Only (No Photos)

Again, assuming that you bought your Mac within the last several years, you likely already have the Calendar or iCal application.  Simply launch Calendar (or iCal) and select File > Print.  From there, simply configure all the options you want such as View (eg, month, week, day), Paper (eg, US Letter), time range, etc. and print.  There you have it--a no-frills, no-cost (well, except for the minimal price of paper and ink/toner) calendar.

Apple iPhoto Face Detection

I typically use Apple iPhoto for the sole purpose of storing my favorite photos and albums so that they can be synchronized to my mobile devices (e.g., iPhone, iPad).  I think the face detection feature (Faces) generally works well, and there are some common and understandable situations in which it may incorrectly identify a person, for example:

• The person is not directly facing the camera (i.e., closer to a side profile)
• The facial expression is unusual (e.g., laughing hysterically, running, squinting)
• The person is wearing a hat

Today I was importing another album into iPhoto, and another obvious reason dawned upon me--the person's face is changing!  When I starting verifying the face detection, I noticed that it kept mistakenly guessing that my daughter was her older cousin, and I had to repeatedly correct the default face detection.  I assume that Faces learns facial patterns over time and that the more data you feed it, the better it performs.  However, my observations above would suggest that Faces is not tailored toward infants and small children who are growing quickly and whose facial dimensions that are included in the face detection algorithms are changing over time.

Since I am almost certain that the folks at Apple Inc. are checking my blog on a daily basis to do market research and to understand my personal needs, I will provide a suggestion for a product enhancement: build age progression algorithms into Faces.  The folks at Merrill Edge have done it in their online retirement planning application (http://faceretirement.merrilledge.com) so I bet the Apple version would produce similar if not superior results, and its user interface would be simple and elegant.  That is, iPhoto would simply allow a user to enter a birthday or age for each facial profile, and from there it would estimate the progression of facial features over time, checking against the EXIF data in each photo to calculate the age of each candidate face at the time the photo was taken, thereby improving face detection for everyone but most notably for small children.  No more overrides of default face detection for Digital Daddy--yeah!

I don't know if this can actually be reliably done, and I'm not sure how much value this would add to applications that use face detection, but it's interesting to think about.  Either way, it is amazing to see that my little girl is growing up, and I am glad that I have captured tens of thousands of photos of her, with countless more to come.  And now, it's time for me to get back to tagging faces.