If you’re like most people these days you’ve got a lot of digital photos, and chances are, you’ve also got picture frames. Here, I’m talking about collage frames (here’s an example.) These are the frames that hold multiple pictures of varying sizes. What I have found is that maybe when I first get the frame I will take the time to crop and trim pictures to just the right size and populate the frame. It tends to be a tedious task and therefore, the pictures never get updated again. Well, I think I’ve found a better way…
Although, if you’ve got the time to build you’re own wall mounted laptop to show off your pictures, that would be very cool.
The overall goal is to create a reusable template for the frame. When you want to update the photos, you use the template on your PC to drop in the digital photos, print, and just trim the sheet (if necessary) and put it in the frame.
- The first step is to get the dimentions of the holes in the frame. You can accomplish this by using a ruler to measure the location and size of each hole or placing a blank sheet of paper in the frame, tracing the holes and scanning it.
- Next, you’ll need to download and install The Gimp. If you’re running windows, you’ll want to get the binaries here along with the required GTK runtime.
- Load up The Gimp and create a new image by selecting
File->New
. You’ll be presented with a dialog where you can specify the paper size and orientation. For this example, I am using 11″ by 8.5″, 150 dpi.
- Now you will see your blank image. At this point, you should have three Gimp windows open. The toolbox, Layers and your image. If you do not see a window called
Layers, Channels, Paths..
then go to your image window and select Dialogs ->Create New Dock -> Layers, Channels & Paths.
(This is a multiple page entry. Click the page number below to continue)
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