making a photo montage

[sphil]

I want to make a photo monatge for DS1 of the last year - I've done it for the last few years but have always cut up the photos and stuck them on. This year I want to go high-tech (!) - so can anyone tell me if there's a simple (very important - it must be simple) way to make a montage on the computer where the photos are in time order?
I've just spent two hours designing one on Snapfish and then realised that their montages just throw the images together randomly, whereas I know Ds1 wants them in date order.
TIA

Power point? Insert photo's onto pages as you want and then 'run slide show', that way they are all in the order that you want?

You just need to pick a background.

I assume you mean something like this montage

I've got Photofiltre v6.2.0 (French spelling but software has English menus too). There's a free version at photofiltre.free.fr but photofiltre.com has the shareware version (10.4) which will only work for 30 days (but may have some extra features).

Clearly you know how many photos there are, but what are you planning to 'do' ?

For example, were you planning to print out the collage on a sheet, or maybe 3 to 6 sheets, or more ?

Were you going to get a large frame, or put the finished collage on the wall ?

Only asking as there are probably a lot of different ways you could do what you need but all depends on the size of finished article.

I put some ideas together but won't frighten you - need to know what size you want.

Networkguy- thats really useful.

I am interested in this too. I would like to do a montage that I (or a print shop) could print onto a sheet and put on the wall I think.

Thanks all - I stumbled across Bonusprint, who have a service where you can resize and move your photos around yourself. Incredibly easy to do, even for me! No idea what the quality will be like, but we'll see...

whatdoesntkillyou hope that Photo Filtre is working well for you. If you're planning single sheet then life is relatively simple...

You can have PF open (not full screen) and drag photos (from a Windows Explorer list of images) then drop them onto PF so it opens them as separate entities, then change the size down to something suitable to go onto the collage, use CTRL-A (select all) and CTRL-C (copy) and then switch to the collage... then use CTRL-V to drop the latest photo onto the collage, position it using the mouse and hit 'ENTER' to 'fix' it in that position.

For image size adjustment you should be able to just change height or width pixel count via "Image" / "Image size" menu, and it will reduce the image keeping it in proportion. Just be sure not to save it as it will overwrite your original... for safety you could use 'save as' and end the name "_small" if you wanted, so the original would be left alone. Once you copy the photo you could close that photo window (so collage window appears again).

Anyway, if you get stuck, come back...