2024 Photo Calendars (part one)

Hi Folks:

This is the fourteenth year that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but (as we did last year) we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2024 was made in May 2023). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars.

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity Photo or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the graphics stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2016 to make the template and saved it as a .docx file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

an 8x10 portrait image, with a large space for an image at the top, and a calendare (January 2024 in this case) at the bottom.The large square at the top is a blank table cell. If you click on it and go to Insert/Picture you can add your own image. The easiest way is to select 12 images that all have the same size/shape (4×5 / 8×10 landscape aspect ratio); otherwise you may have to fiddle with the cell heights to make the calendar line up from month to month. Here is the template file:

2024 Calendar template – Word 2016

As mentioned above, I created a set of calendar files (transparent .png files) and two Lightroom templates for the 2024 calendars. All of the images and instructions can be downloaded from this file: 2024 Calendar Template.zip. There are 13 calendar images: one for each month and one for the entire year. The monthly calendars look the same as the image at the top. The templates are based on an 8″x10″ image size, so they’ll fit easily on letter-sized or A4-sized paper. The annual calendar, for example, looks like this:

An image showing our 2024 annual calendar on the bottom, with the ships docked at Oak Bay Marina at the topFinally, we’ve added 12 more high-resolution calendar images (one for each month), but with each month occupying a full 8×10″ space. They look like this:

This image shows our January 2024 calendar occupying an 8x10 frameYou can use these calendar files along with your own images to create a 2-sided, spiral bound calendar like this:

An 11x17 image; at the top is an image of an orange leather sea star and a green anemone on a rock face at low tide. At the bottom is our 2024 full frame calendar template.or, if you want to get fancy, you can do something like this:

a close-up image of Rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans) occupying the frame. Overlaying that is a calendar for July 2024, with white textWe leave the rest to your creativity! Once we’ve completed our own 2024 calendars in December we’ll add those files to the updated post.

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. Ed Weaver’s (RED Photographic) 2024 Lightroom calendar templates (in several languages) are here. Ed’s templates include a Sunday start date and a Monday start date for those who use that calendar format. Matt Kloskowski has a set of 2024 templates for Lightroom, Photoshop and ON1 Photo along with a video tutorial on creative calendar ideas here. If I come across any others I’ll add them in.

P.S. II, the sequel. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re over a hundred now, I think. There are more tutorial posts in the works … I haven’t yet finished the one on our Epson ET-8550 printer, and I wanted to write one on making panoramas in the rainforest. Calendars first, though.

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