One of my goals for 2014 was to take a photo a day of everyday moments at home with the kids.  January came and went and I had yet to begin the project!  Part way through February I discovered the Collect App – a free photo journal app that helps you document your life in pictures and words one day at a time.  This was exactly what I needed for the daily photo project, and who says you can’t start a New Year’s goal in February!!

Two months later I am still working on the project and I love this app.  It reminds me to add a photo if I forget (which I do often), allows me to add a quick note  about the photo, arranges the photos in a collage or video, and easily exports the cards to be printed.

Since photo books are my area of specialty, I didn’t need to print the cards, but rather export them to my computer to be used in Photoshop.  I found this tutorial from Persnickety Prints on how to export the cards for individual printing and I followed it as a guide for exporting the cards to the computer.  Here is how I did it using an iPhone and iMac:

As you can see, even with the reminders I still forgot to take photos everyday, but at least I am taking some!!

With the free version of the app the only card format available is “Standard”.  There are 6 other styles available when you pay the $1.99 to upgrade.

Even with all those choices available, I still preferred the standard style because the print was bolder and would be easier to read once the cards were in a photo book format.

Now the cards are ready to export.

The cards can go to the camera roll or Dropbox which is a free file sharing service.  I chose to just send them to the camera roll and then moved the photos from there to iPhoto.

To organize the cards into a photo book, I created a page template in Photoshop to use as a guide for placing the cards and simply dragged the photos onto the page.

Twelve cards could easily fit on one page after being resized symmetrically to 2.6″ x 3.4″.  I was even getting fancy (and efficient) by creating an action in Photoshop to resize the photos quickly.

The days that had no photos were replaced with modern patterned paper from the Everyday Neutrals digital kit that I created just for this photo book.

Using the template to help place the cards and then “clipping” the paper to the empty boxes made for a really quick photo book page.  Each page only took 3-4 minutes to make!!  Here are the pages I made for February and March:

If you are looking for a simple way to document daily photos, I encourage you to check out the Collect App and give it a try.   Even if you do nothing with the photos or the cards it is a nice record of the years events. I often flip through the Collect App photos (instead of the camera roll) when I am showing the grandparents some pictures of the kids because it just shows the highlights of our life.

What do you do with your Collect photos?

Leah