<$BlogRSDUrl$>

02 October 2019

Selected Christmas Gift Ideas – Which are Truly Unique 


Christmas has become the feast of the gift trinity: Give, Take, Return
When during Advent the smell of cinnamon cookies reaches our nose, it becomes clear that it is time to think about Christmas presents. Giving is a way of expressing love, compassion and appreciation. Giving also makes a statement like "I love you" or "I am thinking of you".

Give time instead of money
"To find a good gift idea," says the sociologist Dr. Holger Schwaiger (Erlangen and Aberdeen), "you have to empathise with the other, and to feel their feelings and needs by constantly fine-tuning your understanding of the other’s personality. To perceive these signals, you usually have a full year’s time. If you do, you can forgo the lazy option of giving money." The style consultant Ann Green adds, "with a well-chosen gift, the recipient won’t think about the price. "

Cash makes a bad present
When we buy gifts, we remove the price tag, to make it clear, that friendship has no price. Gifts of money are the opposite,” so the sociologist Schwaiger, because “they give the social relationship an economic value.”
Photo Calendars are a popular gift at Christmas

Celebrate common experiences
If you have spent time with a person, you may want to preserve the memories of common experiences in a photo gift. With pictures of celebrations, holidays and other special events, you can make beautiful, personal photo books, photo calendars or Advent calendars - ideal gift ideas to celebrate the most cherished moments of the year.

If you have at least twelve images that you want to show throughout the course of a year, a wall calendar is a great option and can be created easily in just a few steps. You will find more hints & tips in the article Create a wall calendar.

For Advent, there are photo Advent calendars with own pictures and optionally filled with chocolate from Ferrero® or kinder® or "filled" – sugar free – with 24 pictures. In addition, some online services print "craft photo advent calendars for self-filling" with your individual image.

If you have more pictures - for example of a joint trip - it’s a good starting point to create a holiday photo album, to give as a present. The article "My holiday photo album - how to start?" provides practical tips and examples to help your photo book project succeed and to bring joy for many years to come.

A photo gift is the opposite of a money gift.
Well achieved pictures deserve a special place at home, for example as a large format print. Such enlargements work particularly well as a photo canvas print, a gallery poster or a multi-panel. The CEWE® photo poster and wall-art range expanded again this year, with the addition of the innovative Hexxas® system. Hexxas® are hexagonal photo tiles (18 x 15.6 cm or 27 x 23.4 cm in size) that can be arranged flexibly due to their magnetic suspension system.

Real gifts to unwrap, touch and see
Professionally managed web shops from A like Amazon® through F like FotoInsight® to Z like Zara® offer - at a supplement - a gift wrapping service. This ensures that the unwrapping helps to create a positive surprise. Only things that can be touched and felt are real presents!

Instagram at your fingertips: Art Prints "Square"
The Instagram-friendly trend of the year are square prints, bringing the colourful world of digitally recorded experiences into your home. They can be enhanced with frames and effects. As a box set, the square prints (with a 5 inch side length) are a great gift idea.

Art Prints "Retro" - reminding former Polaroids®
Retro prints are sets of quality prints on solid 300 g/m² paper in size 5”x4” (10.2 x 12.7 cm). Retro prints can be edited and decorated with frames and filters. In keeping with the vintage style of former Polaroids®, the print area is 9x9 cm (3 ½” square) in size and has a high-quality layer-effect vanish. As a set of 16, 24 or 32 prints in a pretty storage box, the Retro prints make a joyful surprise.

Your own picture as a fine art print
Decorative prints from own photographs make a very personal present. In its Art Prints range, FotoInsight offers high-quality prints on matt fine art paper in the sizes 13x18, 20x20 and 20x30 cm (approx. A4), starting from just £5.

A picture pairs game with your own pictures: the Photo Memo®
A great gift for the family is the personal Photo Memo®. To print a personalised picture-pairs-game with your own pictures is as easy as ordering prints online. An individual Photo Memo® game with 50 cards (25 pairs of pictures) costs only £12.99 at https://fotoinsight.co.uk/gifts/toys---games/picture-pairs-game.html. The picture pairs game is suitable for children from 4 years of age and is an entertaining, memory training game for the whole family.

Cinnamon, the Christmas spice
As mentioned earlier, the aroma of cinnamon is part of the Christmas season, just like the Christmas tree, candle light and gifts. Cinnamon invigorates the senses and stimulates our well-being, especially during the dark winter days. Cinnamon has a positive effect on the blood sugar level and can help to reduce belly fat and obesity. Since most households do not own a cinnamon grater, cinnamon is sold mostly in powder form. When ground, the Cinnamon cassia quickly loses many of its essential oils, its stimulating effect and part of its aroma. Maybe Christmas is a good opportunity to give a special cinnamon grater, so cinnamon can always be freshly grated to match the quality of rolled Ceylon cinnamon sticks. Cinnamon graters are available from Cinnamon Hill as a grater starter set, which includes one rod of Saigon and Ceylon cinnamon each from just £25 or €30. For more information on Cinnamon graters: https://iitm.be/CinnamonGrater

When well-being and friendship come to the fore, the expectations for gifts change. A list of Christmas gift ideas from various online providers are published in the article "Christmas gift? practical, useful and personal" by the style consultant Ann Green.


Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


28 October 2017

FYO photo Advent calendar with truly personal treats for a loved one 

More filler ideas - than just chocolate - for your loved one’s Advent calendar.

Advent calendars help to embellish the run-up time to Christmas. The Advent calendar has changed dramatically in its 500-year history: for some years now, the online photo service FotoInsight has been printing bespoke Advent calendars with customer’s own pictures. Previously, the photo calendar service has offered customers to personalise their calendars with images and graphic design, but not with chocolates. FotoInsight is changing that now:

The Advent Calendar to be filled with 24 individual surprises

For those who want to personally fill their photo Advent calendar, FotoInsight now offers the option to upload the desired picture and print a photo Advent calendar for self-stocking. The custom printed Advent photo calendar contains a tray, which which can be taken out from one side for filling. Of course, the tray fits not only chocolates, but many little personal treats, to really cheer-up the recipient.

Filler ideas for a personal Advent calendar
An Advent calendar personalised with a photograph is an even bigger surprise when it is filled with truly personal treats. FotoInsight's new photo Advent calendar for self-stocking offers 24 nests, each 3.5 cm deep, for creative surprises such as vouchers for a meal, breakfast in bed, or tokens for time, experiences and surprises. Skin care cream and perfume samples or jewellery fit into the box, as well as some hobby accessories, toys or collectibles. Free concert, theatre or movie tickets can cheer-up the recipient just as well as jokes and puzzles.

A photograph uploaded by the user can be made to feel more Christmassy with the optional design templates! FotoInsight then prints the picture in brilliant colours and with a silk matte finish on the front of the Advent calendar. The result is a decorative eye-catcher, providing fitting decoration for the festive season and shortening the wait for the Christmas holidays, door for door, with 24 personally selected treats.

FotoInsight’s Advent photo calendar for self-filling is made of strong opaline with satin finish and is 48 x 36 x 3.5 cm (WxHxD) large. The compartments for the stockings are each 3.5 cm deep. The height and width of the compartments differ; they are respectively between 5.5 cm and 10 cm high, and between 5.7 cm and 13.5 cm wide. The price is £19.99 (+p&p) at http://fotoinsight.co.uk/photo-calendars/chocolate-advent-calendars/fill-your-own-advent-photo-calendar.html

Photo and Advent calendars from FotoInsight®
Aside from the photo Advent calendars for self-filling, FotoInsight offers a number of high-quality photo Advent calendars, for example:
http://fotoinsight.co.uk/photo-calendars.html


About FotoInsight®
FotoInsight Ltd was founded in Cambridge in 2003. The online photo printing service offers an extensive array of photo and canvas print products as well as photo gifts and award-winning photo books and photo calendars.

Labels: , , , , ,


06 November 2014

The photo calendar is the perfect gift for 2015 

Weeks used to pass between the moment of taking a picture to being able to show that snap to friends; in the age of Facebook, Pinterest and Flickr, it only takes a few seconds. More and more pictures spread faster and faster. Critics fear that good shots will be lost in the flood of images and not be preserved for future generations. 

Photo calendars
Pictures, books and music in digital format can be distributed cheaply and quickly, but when it comes to presenting digital goods as a gift one is literally empty-handed. The printed image, as a canvas, gallery poster or photo book is therefore still very popular indeed. But during the run-up to Christmas and the New Year it is the printed photo calendar which tops the list of gift ideas.

The advantages of the printed image are clear to the eye Those who assemble an annual selection of the best pictures in a photo book will still be able to enjoy colourful memories of the most beautiful moments decades later. Calendars with space for pictures for each of the twelve months and a photograph for the cover page only require selecting the most interesting pictures of the year once. Thus photo books and photo calendars help to avoid loosing good pictures in the flood of digital images, giving them the special place they deserve.


Something unique to unwrap, touch and display
Photo wall calendars
Creative and personal gifts, which show the recipient the effort spent in selecting or designing such a display of affection, are consistently receiving greater esteem than gifts bought off the shelf.

FotoInsight webshop offers photo calendars on silk-matt or glossy print paper or photographic paper, in various sizes up to A2, as desk top or wall calendars or personal organiser with weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual calendar templates. They make ideal gifts as individual family, birthday, kitchen or decorative calendars. At prices between £10 and £35 there is a photo calendar model for everyone and every use e at http://fotoinsight.co.uk/photo-calendars.html.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,


02 February 2011

Photo Acrylic Prints Growing Popularity 

FotoInsight is launching today acrylic poster prints as an additional, high value decorative photo product.






Cambridge. 1/2/2011. - Acrylic-Glass Printing is a trend from the world of advertising and art exhibitions that is coming to offices and living rooms. Acrylic Photo Glass Prints are often described  as "behind glass print". To achieve the highest print resolution, FotoInsight produces the image on real photographic paper and secures it with a special, completely transparent adhesive to a sheet of acrylic glass. FotoInsight’s new acrylic posters do without metal knobs that are needed in less developed acrylic print processes to hold the acrylic glass and print together. As light passes through the side of the acrylic it illuminates the image, giving it additional depth and colour brilliance. This turns digital photographs into highly decorative posters in no time.



The standard of digital cameras has improved considerably. Many have good lenses, high resolution and accurate reproduction of the colours in photographs. Who shoots great pictures wants to print some of them to decorate a home or office. Bright colors, high resolution and depth effect are the ideal components for decorative, large poster prints from digital images. These characteristics are combined in the new acrylic photo prints from FotoInsight. The new acryl print enlargements feature brilliant colours and produce a certain plasticity. The thick acrylic plate adds a great quality impression. Users will welcome the fact that the acrylic photos are easy to clean and long lasting. FotoInsight describes the acrylic material used as "top spec Polymethylmethacrylate with a minimum thickness of 5 mm, which offers a higher scratch resistance than other acrylic products."



FotoInsight’s Managing Director Klaas Brumann talking about the new acrylic print: "Our new posters behind acrylic glass offer greater dimensional stability, UV resistance and durability. Our acrylic posters are not only stronger but also more resilient." The Premium version available from size 40 x 60 cm is 1 cm thick. This gives it more visual depth than other acrylic prints currently on the market.


According to the Marketing Director of FotoInsight the material is characterized by its rigidity and shatter-resistance, eliminating any fraying of the edges and distortion that could otherwise be caused by storage and temperature fluctuations. Sunlight and moist wipes leave the photo prints unaffected. Prints on acrylic glass are particularly suitable for collages and digital pictures with vibrant colours. The acrylic sheet helps to increase the effect of depth in pictures.  The quality processing suits its use in photographic exhibitions and due to its excellent visual appeal, it is used in prestigious art galleries and exhibitions around the world.





Product information

Material: Photographic paper poster behind 5 mm or 10 mm thick acrylic glass.

The sizes 20x30 cm (11.8"x7.9") and 30x45 cm (15.7"x11.8") use 0.5 cm strong acryl. The premium formats 40x60 cm (23.6"x15.7") and 50x75 cm (29.5"x19.7") come with a 1 cm strong sheet of acrylyl.

Turn around time: about 7 working days.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,


09 December 2010

New Photo Calendar Models Arriving 

Cambridge. 9/DEC/2010. - FotoInsight is launching a new website in ecember to improve the online in-browser design experience for photo calendars. In the new website, Fotoinsight’s customers will be able to create individual photo calendars without having to download additional software. With this development come also new photo calendars on photo paper.




Calendars on photographic paper

Photographic paper has come a long way over the past two hundred years. Quality photographic paper offers sharp details, brilliant, true colours and proven longevity.



The new range of calendars on photographic paper is comprehensive, ranging from a desktop calendar with CD case size display for £9.99 to the practical A4 wall calendar and a new 30×30cm (12"×12") square format to the known A3 photo calendar. The photo calendars in A3 are now available not just in portrait format, but as an A3 landscape photo calendar. For those who want their pictures to be big, there’s the new A2 photo calendar size 40.6×60.9cm (16"×24").





Large photo calendar A2 landscape

So far FotoInsight’s photo calendar range has covered everything from desktop calendars, practical kitchen calendars, and compact A4 format to A3 wall calendars. Now FotoInsight goes one larger with the A2 wall appointment calendar. This new calendar is 59.4×42cm (23½"×16½") large and offers more space for pictures and notes. FotoInsight’s Managing Director says about the A2 landscape photo calendar: “With this large photo calendar everyone has the opportunity to make individual calendars which will exceed professionally mass produced calendars from a bookshop in quality, brilliance and durability.”







A new gift idea: Name calendars

Name calendars are a great gift idea for any opportunity like as a Christmas present, on birthdays or as a name-day gift idea. His or her name will come in a different picture every month.



The integrated name feature creates personalised name calendars within minutes. Simply add a name - a picture for each month with the name drawn in will be automatically personalised. Modern computer technology will seamlessly integrate the name into each of the twelve months’ pictures creating a unique, personalised calendar gift.





Dedicated to a name!       

Thanks to the different materials and many sizes, shapes, formats and calendar templates available there should be a calendar suitable for each space or occasion. Photo calendars are a great gift idea all year around, as the user can set the starting month freely. Therefore calendars can run along the academic year or from Mother’s Day to Mother’s Day.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,


26 October 2006

FotoInsight with new Photo Calendar for this Season 

Millions of digital images linger on computer hard drives. Online photo processing companies offer convenient ways to get the best images onto paper and into the open. FotoInsight offers a choice of photo calendar layouts which can start any month from now to the end of year 2008. This is a personal photo gift idea not just for Christmas but for the whole year.

Cambridge, Germany. 26 October 2006. – In time for the holiday gift shopping season, FotoInsight of Cambridge launches an innovative way to tailor a photo calendar from the growing number of personal digital photographs. Presenting someone with a personalized, beautifully laid out calendar with own photographs is arguably one of the greatest gift ideas.


Digital camera users can edit their own photo calendar online at http://fotoinsight.co.uk/photo-calendars.html where it will get professionally printed. Available as a wall or desktop calendar, most models cost just £9.99 and don’t require any software to be downloaded. Each calendar runs for twelve months with space for an additional picture on the cover sheet. Customers making wall or desktop calendars can define which month they wish the calendar to start, great for example as a gift for a birthday in November or a wedding anniversary in May.

With the FotoInsight photo calendar print service it only takes minutes to create a complete, personalized, high quality photo calendar using the summer holiday pics or to create a review of the past year. Interested users might want to create an art calendar edited with their own digital pictures. Images can be uploaded through a Windows or Mac internet browser one at a time or all thirteen images as a ZIP or RAR compressed folder in one go. The layout tool allows zooming and adjusting images before getting the calendar printed.

FotoInsight’s calendar choices comprise:

Decorative Calendar:                 Image W14 x H10.5cm (measures 21x25,5cm)        £9.99

Desk Top Time Planner:             Image W14 x H10.5cm (measures 29.7x13cm)        £9.99

Photo Calendar:                        Image W20 x H15cm     (measures 29.7x42cm)      £14.99

Desktop Calendar (on photo paper) Image W8 x H9 cm   (measures 12.5x14.5cm)     £9.99

Postage & packaging for the UK and most European countries is                                                 £2.99



FotoInsight expects photo calendars to become a popular way to preserve memories from a special vacation. These printed memories are ideal to decorate a wall year around with a fresh image every month. “We have done a number of trials to optimize the finish and appearance of the paper. The response to the final results has been phenomenal” comments FotoInsight Ltd Managing Director Klaas Brümann. He adds: “FotoInsight specializes in photographic gift ideas. The new Photo Calendar is set to resolve many people’s headaches over presents for friends and family.”

Convenience and flexibility

FotoInsight offers a PC and Mac compatible, independent online photo service, fully flexible to be used with images from any digital camera. According to FotoInsight’s management the online service offers an extensive array of award-winning photo printing and photo gift ideas and CEWE photo books, photo posters, photographic calendars, photos canvas printing, for the consumer, business, photography, and graphic arts markets. From Cambridge, Mr Brumann comments: “Photographic memories must never fade. Our technology is smarter, providing long lasting prints with superior quality.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Publishing permission granted; 541 words. Copy or link appreciated.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


Contact information

FotoInsight Ltd.
Klaas Brumann, MD
Cambridge, CB4 1ZP, UK
Skype fotoinside
Tel. +44 8700 114911
pr (@) fotoinsight.com 




Keywords: Photo Calendar, photographic calendars, software, editor, new product, decorative calendar, personalised gifts, photo printing, digital camera, FotoInsight.

Labels: , , , , , ,


24 November 2005

The Photo Processing Industry is Changing Rapidly 

With traditional film down a further 20% this year and photo processing from digital files up 80% the main season shift from the end of the summer holidays to the Christmas gift shopping season.


Agfa, Fuji and Kodak have become household names providing branded products to billions of consumers throughout the past century, but photo processing from conventional film rolls is down about 20% this year. The photo processing industry employs tens of thousand of people in the USA, Japan and Europe and blue chips like Kodak have been rapidly disinvesting from their central labs into other fields like medical imaging, shedding thousands of jobs in their photo labs. In Europe, some of the larger central photo processing companies keep their revenues stable in two ways: Catering for digital photography through POS and online channels, which is up by about 80% over last year (digital accounts for over 20% of all photo development) and with new products like photo calendar printing , photobooks (a new printed photo album), photo mugs, shirts, and other photo gift ideas. Demand for calendars from digital photos was up 1300% in Q4 2005 over the previous year.

The trend towards photo gifts increases the shift in seasonality for the industry. The main season for photo processing used to be the end of the summer school holidays, when people wanted to finally reveal what was on their film roll. With digital photography people have already seen the images several times before processing them and can wait to pick the ones to print, placing their orders between September and December together with a photo book for their partner and a photo calendar or other photo gift for granny. Unlike off the shelf gifts, individual gifts from own photos can only be processed on demand. Photo labs are increasingly seeing the need to install capacity largely underused for nine month of the year and to work 24/7 on the labour intensive photo gifts during the run up to Christmas. With European labour laws making this costly and difficult Europe’s largest independent central lab has put its eyes on Ukrainian. The next stage of the shift in photo printing might see personalized gifts from digital photos being produced in countries with low labour costs and the flexibility to employ a temporary work force during the Christmas season. Goods would need to be shipped back rapidly to where the first world digital consumer demands them.

But it could also happen that people start making more of the photo gifts at home again. For this gift shopping season 1-More is releasing a new version of its popular PhotoCalendar software for PC. Such applications make it easy to create complete, personalized, high quality photo calendar using the summer holiday pics and takes only minutes. Interested users might want to create an art calendar edited with their own digital pictures. PhotoCalendar can also be used to design and print anything from a single page to a thirteen months calendar. There is no better, individual and creative gift for beloved ones.

Many easy-to-use features make the photo calendar output original pieces of art. Applications like 1-More PhotoCalendar help the creative process with many pre-made layouts and the option to add clipart in frames. The registered version allows selecting different typefaces and colors for all parts of the calendar. The order of the objects can be freely defined and image titles and descriptions added. New in this latest release are special filters for professional effects.

1-More PhotoCalendar software can scale calendars to the format supported by the printer, lowering the hurdles to home printing.

Calendars edited in 1-More PhotoCalendar can start on any date of the year, making it a great tool to create gift calendars all year round. The very romantic let the calendar start or end on a special day of the month (this may extend the calendar to thirteen pages; e.g. from Sept. 20th, 2006 to Sept. 19th, 2007), making it the utmost personal present.

The great think about processing or printing photos is that all those digital treasures languishing on hard drives could finally see the light of day with the easy to use PhotoCalendar software. Getting nicely laid out, perfectly printed photo calendars to decorate a wall or desk is easy and set to become the latest must-have application for the creative computer user. Once the user has downloaded the PhotoCalendar applet from the 1-more.com website and installed it, the software guides the user through the calendar creation process. Digital images on a hard drive, CD, or camera are easily accessed. The layout, photo editing and framing tools are self explanatory with clearly laid out icons. A limited version of the application described can be downloaded and used free of charge, the full application for use with own photos costs only $19.- as a download from http://www.1-more-photocalendar.com, where the full version can be unlocked immediately to ensure that gift calendars can be edited and printed in time. Managing Director Michael Bartos and ads: “1-more.com specializes in easy to use creative photographic software. The new release of PhotoCalendar is set to resolve many people’s headaches over presents for friends and family.”

The judgment is open whether central photo labs can compete against domestic craft when it comes to getting personal presents ready for the season. For certain, today’s consumer has more choice than ever.


Press Contact:

International IT Marketing Limited;

Email: cm (at) IITM.info

Tel. +44 8700 114911

Tel. +1 202-470-3242


Labels: , , , , , ,


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?