How to Create a CEWE Photo Calendar

Just like vinyl, real books (and photobooks!), physical calendars have been enjoying a resurgence in popularity in response to the over-digitisation of our lives, and it’s easy to see why. A real calendar is a great way to keep yourself organised, and if you create your own personalised photo calendar, they can be beautiful to look at too.

We know it can be a little daunting however when you’re thinking of creating your own calendar, and that’s exactly why we’ve written this blog. We’ll help you discover our wide range of photo calendars, tell you exactly what they’re perfect for and give you plenty of tips on how to create a photo calendar in our software.

Creating a Photo Calendar as a Gift

If you’re looking to design a personalised calendar, chances are you’d like to create a thoughtful gift for a loved one. Our personalised calendars make wonderful gifts for many reasons; we have a versatile range to fit any need, we pride ourselves on stunning print quality and there’s no other gift that can give your loved ones twelve months of happy memories quite like a personalised calendar.

Photo Calendars to Help You Keep Organised

A personalised calendar is a great way to keep yourself organised at home, school or work. If you’re a family or office team, it can be tricky to keep track of everything across numerous digital calendars. With a personalised calendar from CEWE, you’ll be able to have everything available at a glance, and looking stylish too!

For the Home

We’ve got a number of personalised calendars that would be right at home helping any busy household keep organised throughout the year.

Every home needs a kitchen photo calendar, it’s the right size; small enough to hang in a corner of the kitchen yet big enough to have space for all your appointments. It’s just the functional calendar you need, made extra special with a design and photos you’ve chosen yourself. Available in two sizes.

One of our personalised wall planners would fit right into any home as the perfect way to keep your whole year’s worth of important dates and holidays all in one place! We’ve got a wide range of templates for you to use, and it can be personalised just to your liking with your own photos. Available in sizes A2, A3 and A4.

Our family photo calendar is a brilliant way to keep the whole family on top of their week, and it's fully customizable to suit your home décor.

For the Office

If you’re looking for a calendar to help you stay on top of things at school or at work, take a look at our options below that are just the thing for a busy student or professional to manage their schedule.

Stay organised in style and add a touch of personality to your desk with one of our Desktop Calendars, available in both Landscape and Square. There’s plenty of room for you to pencil in appointments and important dates, as well as more than enough space for your favourite photos to give you a little smile every day.

Or, if you’re looking for a little more room to work with, opt for a personalised appointment calendar. If you wish you can even spread each month across two pages so you’ve got more space on each date to work with, and another opportunity to showcase a lovely photo of your most recent holiday or beloved family pet.

If you’re looking for something you can carry around with you, our Personal Organiser is the perfect choice. It’s A5, so it’s conveniently sized enough to fit into your handbag or desk drawer, but it also gives you plenty of space for your photos and designs so you can make it truly unique to you.

Photo Calendars as Wall Decorations

If you’re looking for a calendar that will truly “wow” everyone that sees it, then you should definitely choose one of our Wall Calendars, which double as a stunning wall decoration along with all the handy features of a calendar too!

Our Wall Calendars are spiral-bound and available in either portrait or landscape, as well as sizes A2, A3, A4 and A5. There are also two sizes of square photo calendar available. You can choose from our wide range of calendar templates, or customise them to fit your tastes – the choice is yours. Make your next calendar a true work of art, beautifully printed in unrivalled CEWE quality.

Photo Calendar Paper Types

If you’ve chosen to create one of our breathtaking personalised wall calendars, then you’ll also need to choose from one of our four high-quality paper types. They each have their own qualities and advantages, so it’s important to get it right.

Classic Paper: Our Classic Paper will give your calendar a semi-gloss finish with a high-quality digital print on 250gsm paper. A versatile all-rounder, this is a great option for a variety of photography styles.

Matte Paper: Our Matte Paper will give your shots a crisp, artistic feel – perfect for black and white photography. Along with the high-quality digital print of this 260gsm paper, it’s also the best option if you’d like to write on your wall calendar, as pen is far less likely to smudge! Perfect for wall calendars that double as both decoration and organiser, and for more artistic calendars.

High Gloss Paper: Our High Gloss Paper’s glossy finish will really bring out the vibrant colours in your photos with a high-quality digital print on 250gsm paper. The UV gloss coating adds a sumptuous thickness to the paper that really adds depth and a punch to your images – perfect for colourful photography.

Gloss Photographic Paper: As with our High Gloss Paper, our Gloss Photographic Paper is brilliantly expressive and lends itself particularly well to colourful photography, with another added benefit. Instead of being digitally printed, we use a traditional wet print process for an incredibly faithful reproduction of your shots. An excellent choice for a decorative wall calendar you’d like to really stand out.

Creating a Personalised Calendar

Once you’ve chosen your calendar, it’s time to get creating! We’ve created a step-by-step guide to help you create your personalised calendar using our free, downloadable software.

Design Calendars vs Creative Calendars

The first choice to make when it comes to creating your personalised calendar is between a “Creative Calendar” or a “Design Calendar”. Simply put, the difference is that you have a far greater degree of creative flexibility with our “Creative Calendars”, as you can freely edit your photo layouts, the calendar templates themselves and so on. Whereas with “Design Calendars” the layouts you choose are fixed, and you can only edit text and photos.

Top Tip: If you’re unhappy with the range of layouts or any other design element available, you can always hit “Download More” to see our full range available to download.

For the purpose of this blog we’re going to focus on the “Creative Calendars”.

Designing Your Personalised Calendar

When you create a photo calendar with us you’re not restricted just to calendar years, and you can choose any start month you want. You also get the option to choose whether or not to include bank holidays in your calendar, and our software comes packed with a “My Entries” option – so whenever you add an entry to a calendar for a specific date like someone’s birthday, it will be saved and always available for any calendars you make in future.

Once you’ve chosen the basic layout, the next step is to add your photos which you can drag in from the left-hand side once you’ve chosen your “Photo Source”. If you’d like to add more than one photo to a page, simply drag another one in or choose from our variety of layouts that contain more than one photo.

If you click a date in the calendar, you’ll get the option to add an “entry” such as an important birthday, and if you double-click the cell in the calendar you’ll also be presented with a variety of options to edit your text such as font type, font size, font colour and the colours of the cells in your calendar.

Additional text can also be added outside of the standard calendar date cells if you’d like to add a funny message to each month, or anything you’d like. You can also freely add other design elements such as clipart and custom backgrounds for your calendar’s pages or masks and frames to place over your photos.

We hope this guide has been helpful and you now feel well-equipped to choose and create the perfect personalised calendar for you to enjoy in 2020 and beyond. If you’d like to show us your creation, we’d love to see it! Find us on social media via our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.