July

Here is my daily photo from July via my Instagram feed.  Followed by a recap of the whole year.  Which wasn’t exactly on purpose… but you know, whatever.

I’ve had a few people ask me how I make my mosiac’s for these.  It’s really pretty easy, well for me.  I use flickr as a storage spot for nearly all my blog photos and instagram photos.  When I post a picture on instagram it automatically uploads to flickr as well.  It makes me feel better having them stored somewhere else that isn’t my own computer or my own blog.  I’m all about backup.

So, since all my photos are already on flickr, at the end of the month I’ll go through and pick one photo from each day and put them in their own set.  Some days I only have one, some have like 10 to choose from.  So each photo isn’t exactly a true representation of the day, but whatever.

Then it’s as easy as using Big Huge Labs mosaic maker to organize them all into a grid.  Big Huge Labs is a free website that has a LOT of different options for making stuff with photos.  I mean, you can personalize and order standard stuff like mugs and calendars and then totally not standard stuff like motivational posters, jigsaw puzzles, pocket photo books and bead art.  Whatever that is.  I’ve never used it for anything but mosaics. I seriously had to go look and see what else you can use it for.  So I’m not an expert or anything, and I can’t give you advice or tips on quality or shipping speed or stuff like that.  But I sure do love the free mosaic maker!

So, when making a mosaic you can upload photos individually, from an entire facebook album, a whole flickr set or they have a few other options.  You can choose the number of columns and rows and customize the width/colors of the white space between photos.  So my monthly roundups are 7 columns and 5 rows, the same as a calendar.  I have a few blank white “photos” on flickr that I’ll add at the beginning of the month as place holders so I can start my first picture on what would be the first day of that month. (For example in March the 1st was a Thursday, so my weeks start on Sunday on the far left and end with Saturday on the right.)  Bet you hadn’t realized that the photos are arranged like that.  Cool huh.

After Big Huge labs has processed my flickr set into a mosaic, which takes about 10 seconds, I save it to my computer and then open it in photoshop to add the date.  I used to do this in Picnic before it closed it’s doors.  Bummer.  The font I use is Budmo Jiggler which I downloaded for free from dafont.com .

And then, after I’ve added my text in photoshop and saved it again I upload it to flickr.  And THEN I use it on my blog. (And then I usually open my flickr photostream on my phone and save my finished image to my phones camera album as well… and then repost it on instagram. HA!)  This might sound like a lot of steps.  But really, the whole process only takes me about 8 minutes.  And that’s if I have to go through and pick which photos to use for each day.  If not, its under 3 minutes.

I also use BHL Mosaic Maker for all my other gridlike photo arrangements.  Like, this one, this one,  this one and this one. And that’s why I love Big Huge Labs so very much.  And they don’t even know I’m talking about them.