With the Holiday season coming up, and everyone getting together, I bet lots photos will be taken with camera phones. If you’ve always thought that’s a pity because you then can’t scrapbook them, let me reassure you! Lately the majority of my photos of everyday life are taken with my phone. It’s the camera I have handy at all times, plus I am an Instagram addict. Once I figured out how to print those photos I was a happy camper!
Here’s how you can do that too.
Access your photos.
I started out using an online application called instaport.me to get my photos from Instagram and onto my hard drive.
Click the image to see larger.
You log in with your Instagram account, and then the application grabs all your photos and exports them in a zip file that you can save to your hard drive.
Pros
1. Quick and painless
2. Many options for selecting photos e.g. you can choose to only download photos in a specific date range, or those with a specific hash tag, only your last 10 or 60 photos, or even just photos that you liked.
Cons
Photos are low resolution, so not the best for printing larger than 2×2. I used photos that I printed that way on this layout.
Once I realised the downside of this method, I opted for downloading my photos directly off my phone storage because those were higher resolution (I can print up to 8×8 with those). I simply used the Samsung software for my phone to access the storage and copy the photos to my hard drive. I use an Android phone, but I know that iPhone users can do the same using Apple Photostream .
Printing Your Photos at Home
This is what I do on my Windows 7 PC.
Option a: I simply open the photos I want to use in Photoshop, and resize them before laying them out on a new document. I originally designed a template for doing this, but found it was easier to just drag and drop my photos onto a blank A4 (letter) document and then print out. I try to print lots of photos at once to save on photo paper. Like I said above, I can print up to 8×8 with this option.
Option b: I also discovered that by using the Printer Wizard on my computer (in Windows) I can easily print 4×4 Instagrams onto a 4×6 photo sheet. To access the photo wizard open up the folder with your JPG images, select the ones you want to print, then select Print from the horizontal menu bar.
Once the wizard opens, select your paper size as 4×6 and make sure that the “resize to fit” box is unchecked.
This works really well with my Epson printer. You can play with yours to see if you have the same options.
And there you have it! Do you scrap your Instagram or camera phone photos? How do you get them printed?
