Online Digital Photographic Processing

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.”

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.

FotoInsight is growing and the size of its photo print products seems to grow with the company. Posters, canvas printing and the photo book XL format are now followed by a new, larger photo calendar format. The largest photographic calendar is exclusive to the FotoInsight Pro software; the use of an offline ordering software client became necessary to ensure a safe upload of larger images to the lab. With the FotoInsight Pro photo calendar and photo book software comes a range of editing tools, which internet browser could not handle. Editing the calendar through a special software tool allows for example to freely position any number of images on a single page. This is useful when a event should be enhanced by scanned holiday memories, like entrance tickets, postcards or maps – these can now be integrated into a professionally printed photo calendar. The increase in design flexibility follows requests from customers, ordering personalised photo calendars year after year for friends and family.

The resolution of digital images is constantly increasing and professional laboratories now achieve super sharp prints in large formats. “With the improvements in digital cameras it started making sense to offer larger photo calendars”, says FotoInsight’s Managing Director Klaas Brumann and adds: “We do not limit the print area for images on the monthly calendar page. Photos can cover the whole page and the calendar template can be layered over images.”

The number of photos taken has been increasing sharply, with the share of those being printed dropping constantly. With the technological advancements in screens and photo-sharing the user prints special images for special occasions; quality expectations towards print products and photo gifts are on the rise. Photo calendar print from digital images is ‘the fashion’. A photographic calendar ordered through the online service FotoInsight, gets printed on the latest generation of Indigo printing equipment. In this process so called ElectroInk, with particles 1µm to 2µm small, is applied. The reduced particle size of the toner creates a higher perceived resolution of the printed image, cleaner edges and finer, finer, more adherent layers than traditional printing methods.

Sticking in is so yesteryear – today it’s professionally printed calendars

FotoInsight is updating it’s photographic calendar range just in time for the year-end gift shopping season, with photo gifts made from the users own digital images, which the online service delivers professionally printed on 250 g/m² paper. Instead of sticking images in, digital image files allow for an individual design and professional print, on a variety of personalised gifts like photo mugs, shirts or photobooks. FotoInsight’s Managing Director comments “FotoInsight specialises in photographic gift items. The new generation of photo calendars will resolve many people’s problems in finding unique gift ideas.”