Hi Folks:

This is the eleventh year now that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before, we’re also making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested. For our calendar we’ve used images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2021 was made in May 2020). Because 2020 has been what it was, we didn’t do any significant travel off of Vancouver Island this year and 11 of the 12 images were made in and around the Victoria area. We did manage to trade Victoria for Tofino (on Vancouver Island’s wet coast) for a bit in October, and the image for that month was made in Ucluelet.

click on the image to access the .pdf file for download

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity Photo or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the graphics stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2016 to make the template and saved it as a .docx file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

The large square at the top is a blank table cell. If you click on it and go to Insert/Picture you can add your own image. The easiest way is to select 12 images that all have the same size/shape (4×5 / 8×10 landscape aspect ratio); otherwise you may have to fiddle with the cell heights to make the calendar line up from month to month. Here is the template file:

2021 Calendar template – Word 2016

As mentioned above, I created a set of calendar files (transparent .png files) and two Lightroom templates for the 2021 calendars. All of the images and instructions can be downloaded from this file: 2021 Calendar Templates.zip. There are 13 calendar images: one for each month and one for the entire year. The monthly calendars look the same as the image at the top. The templates are based on an 8″x10″ image size, so they’ll fit easily on letter-sized or A4-sized paper. The annual calendar, created using the Lightroom template and one of our images and printed to .jpg from Lightroom, looks like this:

Finally, we’ve added 12 more high-resolution calendar images (one for each month), but with each month occupying a full 8×10″ space. They look like this:

You can use these calendar files along with your own images to create a 2-sided, spiral bound calendar like this:or, if you want to get fancy, you can do something like this:

We leave the rest to your creativity! Our best wishes to you and those close to you for a new year full of as much love, excitement, joy, peace and harmony as you can handle!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. For the past several years, Ed Weaver at RED Photographic has made Lightroom calendar templates available. You can find the ones for 2021 here. Helen Bradley also has a set of templates for Lightroom for 2019 to 2021 here.  And Matt Kloskowski has a set of 2021 templates for Lightroom, Photoshop and ON1 Photo here. Matt also has a post on creative calendar ideas here. If I come across any others I’ll add them in.

P.S. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re closing in on a hundred now, I think.