photo-gift-giving.jpgIn this post Matt Bambert shares some ideas on usig your photos as gifts – his post is based upon his book 101 Quick and Easy Secrets for Using Your Photographs.

If you’ve got thousands of images sitting in hard drives around your house, you can put them to work for you by making gifts with them for family, friends, coworkers and all those other people you feel you want to give those little holiday somethings to.

First, start with family and others you love with a big gift. If you assess the living space in which your family members reside so that you can match a photo with the decor, you can make them a framed photo, getting all the supplies you need from the Internet. You can even have the photo printed to any size you want up to as big as one of their walls (see BigHugeLabs.com below), all using the Internet. You can do it yourself by buying the frames at FrameDestination.com or have all done for you at Pictureframes.com (click on Print & Frame Images). You’ll begin with uploading a high resolution photo on at their website. That means if you want an 11X14 framed print, you should have taken the image with a digital camera (preferably a dSLR camera) of at least 8 MP. If you print any bigger than that you’ll get pixelization (those pesky little colored dots that appear all over your photo).

At BigHuge Labs you can get moderately priced gifts such as jigsaw puzzles and posters made from your photos. The site has a generator that lets you make posters in different styles, from Andy Warhol art to giant baseball cards. The best feature on that site is their generators, which allow you to upload your photo so you can see how it would look as one of the featured poster styles available on their site. If you like it you can have it printed in high resolution and buy it.

For that little something you want to pick up for the mailman or your child’s teacher, there’s zazzle.com, a site where you can create mugs, t-shirts, greeting cards, calendars and even shoes with your pictures on them. The site has a feature where you can upload your image to see how it looks on the product you are purchasing. Also, there are hundreds of sellers on the site who sell their one-of-a-kind designs. If you feel entrepreneurial, you can set yourself up to sell your designs on their site.

This is just the beginning of a gift-giving adventure. For more ideas check out the book, 101 Quick and Easy Secrets for Using Your Photographs. Happy gift-giving!

Have you used your photos to produce gifts using services like these? Share what you’ve done and what services you’ve used in comments below.

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