The time is near when many of us make that final flip of our calendar. That household tool that reminds us of special events like birthdays, anniversaries, appointments, holidays, and basically whatever we don’t want to forget. 

So, we head out to our local getting place in search of a 2022 calendar. We flip through the calendars filled with kittens, landscapes, and dozens of other themes before settling on one. There’s nothing wrong with kittens, landscapes, or whatever theme you may like. There is something wrong with settling.    

Quick Links

• How to Make a Wall Calendar in 7 Steps
  • Download the Motif App
  • Open Apple Photos
  • Set your calendar options
  • Select a theme
  • Add custom dates and text
  • Add photos to custom dates
  • Check out to make it yours
• DIY wall calendar ideas & tips
• Create a custom photo wall calendar for 2022

Instead of settling on photo wall calendars filled with someone else’s kittens, landscapes, and featured dates, make your own custom wall calendar. All you really need are photos which most of us are flush with. An easy-to-use photo project app makes it possible to create your own wall calendar. 

How to Make a Wall Calendar in 7 Steps

Now if you’re thinking a personalized wall calendar will require enlisting your tech savvy kids or relatives for help, you’re wrong. The photo project app Motif works within your Apple Photos seamlessly. A slick tutorial is available to walk you through your first project. You can also follow along the next few segments for a quick overview.   

1. Download the Motif App

Making a wall calendar begins by visiting the App Store or the Mac App Store. Search for the Motif Photos app and download to your Mac desktop/laptop and iPhone/iPad. It’s free to download and use. If you like what you create, hit the Checkout button to purchase.  

2. Open Apple Photos

A custom wall calendar is usually filled with your own photos, so what better place to start one than in your Photos app. There’s no uploading photos required.

On your Mac, select the photos you want to create your calendar with. In the File menu select Create, then Calendar, and then Motif. 

On your iPhone or iPad, open the Motif app and choose the Calendar product. Set your calendar options and tap Next to select the memory or album for your calendar.  

3. Set your calendar options

The calendars you buy off the shelf come preset with common holidays. They begin with January and end in December. The next step of creating photo wall calendars is setting your calendar options. Choose the start year, start month, length, first day of the week, language, and national holidays you’d like to include. 

If you want to make your own wall calendar week begin on a Monday and end on a Sunday, then do it. Motif gives you the power to make it fit your needs. 

4. Select a theme

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Your custom wall calendar can easily take on a predesigned theme simply by choosing one of many Motif provides. Since your calendar is going to be a photo calendar, the theme will compliment the photos you choose for it. 

Once you select your theme you’ll have the option to choose Autoflow Calendar or Don’t Autoflow. The Autoflow feature places your best images throughout your calendar. It balances image orientations and optimizes image centering and cropping. If you’d like to place all the images yourself, select Don’t Autoflow. 

5. Add custom dates and text

Here’s your opportunity to get creative. This calendar might need a title. You might want to add a caption to the photos throughout your calendar. Click the Aa icon in the lower right corner to customize away. 

Click on any date to add text for birthdays, anniversaries, or whatever occasion you deem special.  

6. Add photos to custom dates

If a simple “Mom’s Birthday” doesn’t quite capture the magnitude of the occasion, drag a favorite photo of Mom from the image tray below to that date box. Scale, screen, or rotate it to make it perfect. If you have a tropical vacation planned, fill those days with fitting imagery. Just another way to make a custom wall calendar your own. 

7. Check out to make it yours

Once you’ve looked for spelling errors and have made sure the photos are just the way you want them, click the Checkout button. Motif automatically checks your images for resolution issues and other possible errors. 

In the following screens you’ll enter your billing/shipping information. Then, think about how many copies you’d like. These make for great gifts. Then enter your credit card information and any promo discount codes before hitting Pay. 

Then, sit back and let our professionals do what they do best. With over 100 years of printing expertise, you can trust we’ll ship a quality calendar. 

DIY Wall Calendar Ideas & Tips

When you decide not to settle on a store-bought calendar, you’re taking control of how your calendar will look. The photos you use will obviously be your favorites and will bring out the true character of every friend or family member featured. If you have a favorite color or region on the color wheel, be sure to apply the proper amount to your calendar. Select the theme and maybe some patterns to bring it all together. 

Just like you might find in the store, you too can fill your calendar with some really nice landscape or nature photos. Is your kitten the cutest thing ever? Gather all your favorite shots of Sylvester. That device you stare down at so much has the ability to take really amazing photos. The possibilities of photo themes are as endless as your imagination. 

Create a Custom Photo Wall Calendar For 2022

Given the fact that most of the photos you’d use in your calendar are already in your Photos app, a custom wall calendar is only a handful of clicks or taps away. Just follow the steps covered earlier in the story and you’ll find out how easy it is. Never settle for a store-bought calendar again.  

Bring your best photos to life with Motif.

Experience how easy creating personalized photo projects is with Motif. Our photo project app seamlessly works with Apple Photos in macOS and iOS. We do all the complicated stuff leaving the fun creative freedom to you.

The post Make Your Own DIY Wall Calendar For 2022 appeared first on The Motif Blog.

Every January, we begin our New Year’s resolutions with the best of intentions.

Forming good habits is difficult, and there’s always room to improve—it’s the reason we make these resolutions in the first place. To give yourself the edge this year, be sure to make creative use of great tools.

And an often-overlooked tool is an inspirational calendar.

How a calendar can help motivate you

If you want to make your resolution stick, make it a habit. The best way to make it a habit is to do it regularly. Easier said than done? Absolutely. But an inspirational calendar can give you an edge here.

Over at Lifehacker, Brad Isaac recounts the time he met Jerry Seinfeld backstage at a comedy club. He asked the comedian if he had any tips for an up-and-comer, and Seinfeld told him the only way to be a better comic is to write better jokes, and the only way to do that is to write every day.

Seinfeld’s solution was to mark any day he wrote a joke on his calendar with a big red X. After a few days, he’d have an eye-pleasing chain of Xs. The longer the chain, the more accomplished he felt, the more motivated he became. Now, he had to maintain the chain to reinvigorate his motivation.

Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” rule is an excellent method for using a calendar to spur you toward your resolution.

“[This] works because it isn’t the one-shot pushes that get us where we want to go, it is the consistent daily action that builds extraordinary outcomes,” Isaac explains.

We like Seinfeld’s rule because it is easy to revise to meet your unique goal. Say your resolution is to do more nature hiking. You may only be able to get away during the weekends, so your chain will be a vertical line of Saturdays, not horizontal across the week.

Perhaps you want to exercise more? Then swap out those Xs for bold numbers declaring the minutes you work out each day. Adding them up at the end shows you your overall accomplishment, even if you missed a day or two.

Whatever your specific resolution, the calendar offers a quick visual reminder of the progress you’ve already made.

Images can drive your New Year’s resolution

Inspiring pictures can propel you to break through your walls. The motivational poster industry has known this for years. We like the sight of mountain climbers or breakers crashing against an oceanside cliff as much as the next person, but to truly motivate, we find there’s no substitute for a photo from our collection.

Designing a New Year’s resolution calendar with an app like Motif allows you to personalize each month’s photo. You can then choose the images you know will keep you motivated.Say your resolution is to save money to travel. You can create a calendar with pictures you took during past vacations. Photos featuring loved ones’ smiling faces, local celebrations, and beautiful landscapes are a yearlong reminder of the fun you’ve had and value you place in those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

Or maybe you want to renovate your home this year. You can include images of designs that influence you, photos from past projects, or drawn plans to offer a visualization of success. By creating a calendar that is truly your own, you direct how you’ll view the year month after month.

Motivational messages throughout the year

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the right words are worth all the motivation in the world. Spare no expense and add some motivational messages to go with your personalized images.

What messages do and don’t inspire will depend greatly on you. You may find quotes from historical figures stimulating or maybe it’s a loving thought from a family member. A mixture of both?

Figure out what types of messages incentivize you and include those on your calendar. Be sure to spread them throughout the year but add some extras during the early months, when you’ll need that motivational boost to keep going.

Create an inspirational calendar with Motif

It’s not too late to create your New Year’s inspirational calendar, and Motif is here to help. Motif integrates with Apple Photos to give you seamless access to your photos. As of its newest update, you can even add personalized text to any day. These features ensure you’ll have all the motivation you need see you through the entire year.

Want to be really inspired? Add text and a favorite photo to any day.

Making a New Year’s resolution stick isn’t easy. But with the proper mindset and tools, you can increase your chances of success exponentially. An inspirational calendar that speaks to you and your resolution is a wonderful tool to help you maintain that growth mindset.

The post How to Stick to Those New Year’s Resolutions with an Inspirational Calendar appeared first on The Motif Blog.

So, you’ve decided to create a custom family photo calendar. Great! This is exactly the type of custom photo project you’ll love whether you plan to keep it for yourself or gift it. It’s a win-win!

Another win: Choosing a printing service that makes creating your calendar easy. Motif is a photo app that works natively with your Photos in macOS, creating a seamless flow from the moments you’ve already captured, through layout design, and all the way to printing.

If you choose to print through Motif, your family photo calendar will be produced with the finest inks, papers, and bindings, ensuring your photos are as vivid come time for December’s page as they are when they first reach your mailbox.

As you create it, you’ll have to conquer what is, for many of us, the most challenging part of any photo project: deciding which pictures make the cut.

Life is full of great memories, and each captured moment can take you back time. However, you need to let the right moments shine and tell a story. Here are a few ways to whittle down to your final inclusions.

Decide what your narrative is.

Every photo project should have a tale it aims to tell. Your family photo calendar is no different.

The beautiful thing is that it’s yours to write, from initial concept through the end. That means you can decide whether your calendar tells the story of a single amazing family vacation like last winter’s ski trip, the excitement and love that comes with welcoming a new addition to the family, or an inclusive calendar that dedicates a single page in this year’s calendar to what happened in that month the preceding year.

The options are endless, and there are no wrong choice. Just make sure you take a moment to decide what direction you want to take before you dive into your photo library.

Consider your audience.

If you plan to keep the calendar for yourself, go with whatever you most like. However, if you’re giving it away as a gift, consider your audience as you choose photos. For example, if your child’s soccer coach is the recipient, you can quickly narrow down potential photos to images from the past season or their coaching tenure.

However, if you’re gifting the year’s story to grandparents, they’ll love to see as many of their grandchildren’s defining moments as possible. Looking at your photo library through the lens of your calendar recipient will help you quickly cull the list of potential inclusions.

Resist the urge to include everything.

A great photo collection is a sign of a year filled with many happy moments. As you decide which photos to include, it’s often tempting to cram in as many of those moments as possible. However, when you squeeze too many images onto a page, you miss the opportunity to shine a spotlight on those memories that serve as anchor points to your calendar’s narrative.

Remember how we recommended defining your story earlier? After you decide what it is, take some time to determine key points—just like you would if you were writing the outline for a book; that way, when it’s time to narrow down your selection, you’ll know which events to look for and keep in focus. As a best practice, consider including anywhere from one to five photos per page, varying that count throughout your calendar.

If there are additional photos that you’d like to include that perhaps didn’t make the cut into your main photo layout, consider integrating them into your calendar days. For example, if you have a great photo of the day you first brought your kitten home, you can now add it to that date on your calendar! Motif’s newest release makes it possible to customize as many days of your calendar as you like with text and/or a photo. Simply click and drag from your image tray and drop it onto the appropriate calendar date.

Theme and unify each page.

Think of your calendar as a novel, with each page as a chapter, rather than a soap opera. A soap opera jumps around and can be difficult to follow, but a novel is planned—there’s a sequence of events you can follow. Like the novel, your calendar should move through the months of the year in a way that makes sense and has a theme.

Your theme for each chapter/page of your calendar can be a particular event, such as August’s back-to-school photos or a specific holiday. Alternately, you might tie the page together through a unified palette, selecting photos that coordinate by color. Focusing on a specific topic, feel, or look will keep you organized and help you narrow down potential photos for inclusion as you classify and identify shots that fit your selected topic.

Get a second set of eyes.

When you’re looking at your own photo library, every image feels important, and it’s difficult to choose just one. You probably don’t have the same anguish or debate when you’re looking at someone else’s albums. So if you’re having trouble choosing, get a second set of eyes. Every book needs an editor, right?

Find a friend who’s willing to take a look at what you’ve picked out so far and give you an opinion on which pictures are best. This can be particularly useful when you’re attempting to decide between several similar images or multiple shots from the same event.

Can’t decide? Let us give you a nudge.

One of the most unique advantages of using Motif for your family photo calendars is that the smart app can do the hard work for you. It uses advanced technology to analyze your photos for overall quality and similarity. It also takes important factors into account—like image focus and clarity, people, faces, smiles, image orientation, panoramas, and more—before removing duplicates and recommending which photos to include. As a bonus, when you use Motif’s photo-selecting abilities, you can build your entire custom calendar in a matter of minutes!

The post Choosing the Best Family Calendar Photos appeared first on The Motif Blog.