A couple nights ago I came across a link on Apple’s “Hot News” page to a tutorial on how to make a Life Poster. At the time I had no idea what that meant, but if Apple was plugging something that wasn’t theirs then I knew it would be cool. After clicking the link I landed right spot on top of Mike Matas’ new blog. Sure enough, he had come up with yet another brilliant idea… and this is what I love about him. Mike is easily one of the smartest, most gifted and respected guys in my field and his award winning Mac application, Delicious Library, is but a small start in his bright future. But moving on…
So in any case, after reading the tutorial which basically involves Apple’s iLife ‘05, 98 good photos and a quick import / export in Photoshop, I knew that I would be making my own Life Poster. And on top of that, I knew that it was going to blow (my) Mike away when he saw it.
Since I am linking to the tutorial here, I don’t want to go to much into it other then writing about my own experience with the project. I was afraid that I would have trouble finding 98 photos that I would want to stare at. Once I got into iPhoto though, I realized the hardest part would be weeding my album, which contains a bit over 1,400 photos, down to just 98. I also pretty quickly realized that I didn’t want that many photos of family and friends (no offense) so I tossed a couple dozen nice shots of vacations and geocaching in there for good measure.
So after completing his tutorial I forked $22.99 over to Kodak via iPhoto’s “Purchase Prints” area and they promised to print me a 20″ x 30″ high gloss Life Poster. Even better than that is the fact that I submitted it yesterday late afternoon and it shipped out this morning! How is that for fast turn around? The one thing that mildly bothers me is that the poster, once imported back into iPhoto, weighed in at about 160 MB in size. But when it transmitted the poster to Kodak, iPhoto said it was sending a 11 MB file. I am sure Apple has some sort of on-the-fly compression or something for reasons like this so I will just keep thinking positive.
January 19th, 2006 at 12:27 pm #James Adams
I’m worried about exactly the same thing. I’ve got over 3500 photos in iPhoto and am convinced there is no way I can get that down to 98. But the biggest problem might turn out to be finding diverse subject matter. Maybe I’ll be happily surprised at all the different stuff I find once I get looking. Either way, I’m looking forward to ordering prints from Apple for the first time. Not to mention the relatively inexpensive price for that size poster.