Post by LadySivitri on Jul 18, 2008 16:34:23 GMT -5
After hassling with this for the first time this week, I thought it would be nice to get some info and ideas together.
I called one of my CVS stores when the first store's kiosk wouldn't take anything but CDs! I don't think it is hooked up right - none of their card readers or USB ports work. The bigger store's kiosk works just fine, and it has a scanner, too! THAT, however, was out of order.
I found it easiest to load the pics up onto a thumb drive. Easy, reusable, and free (my husband works at Staples and gets a lot of these as promos).
When you get a free 10-page photo book, you select nine photos then one for the front page, which seems to appear smaller on the page. I guess this is so most of the picture peeks through the front of the photo book. You can select more pictures and then drag and drop them to other pages, but make sure you get down to a total of ten pages. It will delete pages after there are no photos on them. You have to use the drag and drop feature to get your pictures in the order you want them. Really you could mess with the order afterwards before you hand them over to be bound, so at least get the pictures on the background that fits best. I didn't do that at first and ended up with a picture of a family member with a big bushy beard and mustache on a pink floral background! (oops!) I haven't played around with layouts or anything, but I've seen pages with four photos on them, nothing fancy though. You do get to choose a set of backgrounds at the beginning, but you can't combine sets afaik. So every picture has a mat frame around them.
You can rotate, crop, adjust brightness/contrast/color levels, add text, and really do a lot of manipulating with your pictures. I went in with all of my pics rotated the way I wanted them, but this is nice to know for the future.
The kiosk spits out the photos and the guy at the photo counter binds them into a book. I liked that because I paid for three 4x6 photo books (each one on a different CVS card) and had 29 pics stapled together. It was a little too much and it wouldn't fit into the cover, but I'm thinking 15-20 will fit into one book. He was out of covers anyway, which was fine since I didn't need them. And in the future if I just want some pictures I may not have them bound at all. I didn't mind paying for the covers - or not paying actually - since they were free or money makers anyway, right!
So with the 4x6 photos, I printed out headshots of the family for Dot, since she is starting to like looking at faces. Why should I cut them out of a magazine when she can learn to recognize family members that might not live close by? I had 29 done so far, so I used the 3 books for that, and printed an extra of her own headshot to put into her keepsake box, which has room for three more photos that I will have to remember to get printed out next time! I will have my husband spiral bind them all together tomorrow.
With the 6x8 photos, I went ahead and made six of the 10-page books. I titled it "Dot's Brag Book, 0-3 months" and put her best pictures in there, in order of age. In the future I might put captions on them. I'm not really into scrapbooking so this is as good as it gets for now. I'm thinking I can keep a theme going with that!
I printed out two of the books, decided I liked the way it turned out, then went back into the history and had it "resend" the order twice, to print out four more books. That way I didn't have to do it all over again. I had to page to the end though; the history showed all the projects done in the order they were completed.
Don't forget to take your media / card / drive home with you!
Okay, so does anyone else have any tips? Has anyone used the scanner, and do you get to save the file, too? Or just print pics from them?
I called one of my CVS stores when the first store's kiosk wouldn't take anything but CDs! I don't think it is hooked up right - none of their card readers or USB ports work. The bigger store's kiosk works just fine, and it has a scanner, too! THAT, however, was out of order.
I found it easiest to load the pics up onto a thumb drive. Easy, reusable, and free (my husband works at Staples and gets a lot of these as promos).
When you get a free 10-page photo book, you select nine photos then one for the front page, which seems to appear smaller on the page. I guess this is so most of the picture peeks through the front of the photo book. You can select more pictures and then drag and drop them to other pages, but make sure you get down to a total of ten pages. It will delete pages after there are no photos on them. You have to use the drag and drop feature to get your pictures in the order you want them. Really you could mess with the order afterwards before you hand them over to be bound, so at least get the pictures on the background that fits best. I didn't do that at first and ended up with a picture of a family member with a big bushy beard and mustache on a pink floral background! (oops!) I haven't played around with layouts or anything, but I've seen pages with four photos on them, nothing fancy though. You do get to choose a set of backgrounds at the beginning, but you can't combine sets afaik. So every picture has a mat frame around them.
You can rotate, crop, adjust brightness/contrast/color levels, add text, and really do a lot of manipulating with your pictures. I went in with all of my pics rotated the way I wanted them, but this is nice to know for the future.
The kiosk spits out the photos and the guy at the photo counter binds them into a book. I liked that because I paid for three 4x6 photo books (each one on a different CVS card) and had 29 pics stapled together. It was a little too much and it wouldn't fit into the cover, but I'm thinking 15-20 will fit into one book. He was out of covers anyway, which was fine since I didn't need them. And in the future if I just want some pictures I may not have them bound at all. I didn't mind paying for the covers - or not paying actually - since they were free or money makers anyway, right!
So with the 4x6 photos, I printed out headshots of the family for Dot, since she is starting to like looking at faces. Why should I cut them out of a magazine when she can learn to recognize family members that might not live close by? I had 29 done so far, so I used the 3 books for that, and printed an extra of her own headshot to put into her keepsake box, which has room for three more photos that I will have to remember to get printed out next time! I will have my husband spiral bind them all together tomorrow.
With the 6x8 photos, I went ahead and made six of the 10-page books. I titled it "Dot's Brag Book, 0-3 months" and put her best pictures in there, in order of age. In the future I might put captions on them. I'm not really into scrapbooking so this is as good as it gets for now. I'm thinking I can keep a theme going with that!
I printed out two of the books, decided I liked the way it turned out, then went back into the history and had it "resend" the order twice, to print out four more books. That way I didn't have to do it all over again. I had to page to the end though; the history showed all the projects done in the order they were completed.
Don't forget to take your media / card / drive home with you!
Okay, so does anyone else have any tips? Has anyone used the scanner, and do you get to save the file, too? Or just print pics from them?
