Our daughter did recently turn 18. She wanted an amazing, memorable gift for her birthday. She wanted to be surprised but her list included things like : a new bicycle, a new uwheel scooter or maybe an apartment in New York or a Villa in Los Angeles, maybe some more jewellery.
The boring parents we are wanted something lasting that she would be happy. After many different options we decided to make something very special. We would make her a personalized album with 1 page written, drawn, painted or what ever artistic idea people may have by all the family members and her best friends. This turned out to be a major nightmare to arrange secret meetings to give people the orders to make their page and then collect them, request pictures of people we did not have, …
We had to go back to some old photos when she was a baby and these where in the pre-dgital age format negative or photos. I did not want to take these pictures out of old albums and we had to go back to the negatives. Thankfully a few years back the labs here had launched small contact sheets with all the pictures. They did cost a little but WOW did they make my life easier. I found the pictures very easily. And some other memories. I used my tried set-up with the camera to convert all the negatives to digital pictures and then process them to make them look good.
We have also all our pictures since 2003 in digital format how do we find for every family member a relevant picture or 2 ? At the end of May 2015 I had registered with Mylio and installed it on my PC, my tablet and the Sony Xperia of my wife. When ever I had some free time while travelling or waiting I had been adding people tags to many of my pictures it was a breeze to find the people add all the pictures into am Mylio album and then find the original pictures to print them.
Once we had all the pictures in a single album from both negatives and digital graveyard it was easy to define the selection, colour code the pictures base on print size.
We then used our Epson R3000 to print all the pictures and a few page with text. This text printing turned out to be a very bad idea. I had never used the matt black ink he last 84 weeks I have owned the printer. The pages printed fine but any new photo print turned out with very ugly colours. It did take me 3 days and many cleaning cycles to be back to nice photo prints again.
How did our daughter take this gift ? She was deeply touched and actually cried as she browsed though the pages and saw that even her best friends who can’t keep a secret managed to hide this from her. When she finished reading the pages she was enve more touched by what the people had done there where some real nice pieces of art and many people did write very though full things and without the help of ready made quotes from the internet
