Here are some tips for creating great items from your vacation photos.
Make a Book.
Everyone has photo albums, but a coffee table book is a conversation piece.
Blurb.
com offers hardcover books with design templates that use your photos and text.
In a couple hours you can design and proof a book that will arrive at your house in a couple of weeks.
Better yet, you can order multiple copies for friends and relatives, and you can also offer the book for sale on the Blurb site if you wish.
DVD Slide Show.
There are many products which will take your images and make a slide show with music.
Consider a program that will move or zoom the images smoothly, allow you to put annotations, and choose music to coordinate with the slides.
My program of choice is ProShow Gold for beginners, and ProShow Producer for professionals.
Just don't get too wacky with the transitions...
they get old quickly.
And remember that you can't sell a DVD that has recorded music on it unless you have specific permission to do so.
Gift Cards.
Using your home printer with the right card stock, you can take your images and produce professional quality note cards or greeting cards.
Or you can do some web searching and let someone else print them for you.
If you search for "press printed" products, you will receive professional quality cards, often with envelopes.
These always please the recipient, as they are useful and a personal gift from you.
Scrap Booking.
Start those scrapbooks!Take images and combine with souvenirs, funky text and fonts, and create a homemade vacation journal that you will treasure forever.
Local craft stores offer scrapbooking classes and supplies.
Coffee Mugs.
Take that great image and put on a mug.
Many web sites will take your image and produce mugs, coasters, puzzles and clothing products.
Canvas Prints.
Have a truly wonderful image?Consider having it printed on canvas for wall display.
The gallery wrap style is a frameless canvas where the image stretches around the sides of the mount.
Web search for "gallery wrap canvas" and you'll see many sites that offer this service.
They are not cheap, but the results are breathtaking! Framed Gift Prints.
Carefully edit, size and print your images.
Purchase or make custom frames and give the resulting framed image as a gift.
Your personal touch and time will be appreciated by your recipient.
Electronic Photo Frames.
They are inexpensive and really neat.
Download your edited images to a chip, add some music if desired, and load to one of these digital frames.
It will play a slide show of your images with music.
Also makes great gifts! Screen Savers and Wallpaper.
Your image editing program probably has a feature to change your windows wallpaper to use the current image.
Just make sure it's sizes the proper proportions so that it is not stretched in any direction.
Some built-in screen savers will make a photo slide show of files in a folder.
Or you can get a program that will build a standalond screen saver that has your photos and which you can send to others to enjoy.
Mouse Pad.
For a modest price, your images can be put on a mouse pad.
There are many sites on the web which will do this for you.
Postage Stamps.
Yes, you can now get official US postage stamps with your images on them.
Photo Sharing Sites.
Put your photos out there for all (or some) to see and enjoy.
Some sites will allow you to password protect photos if you are concerned with privacy.
Enjoy these tips and create some great products and memories!