I am a big fan of using your photos--not just letting them sit online or on your phone or hard drive. I like to have them in my hands to look at and share with others. One of my most recent ways of sharing my photos has been printing them to use on cards.
Today I am sharing how I print my Instagram photos (or Instagram look alikes) at home. There are a lot of places out there that print your Instagram photos in a square but I wanted to be able to print a few at a time and from my own home.
The first step in printing your photos is the print setup. If you are printing Instagram photos, they will already be cropped to a square. If you want to print square photos that are not from Instagram, simply crop your photo before printing it in any photo editing software (including the many you can find for free online).
When the print screen comes up you will want to print your photos on 4x6 paper size. I use 4x6 photo paper to print on but you could print on any type of paper (sometimes I print photos on white cardstock). You can choose whether you want the photo to have a border to not (if given the option) as well as how the photo fills the page. I use "print entire image" for this basic square size.
Once printed, your photo will be set in the center of your 4x6 print. These look great as is (lots of white space is very popular and has a polaroid feel to it) but in order to have that Instagram look, you will trim the photo around the image. If you wanted larger photos, you could do the same process but print on 5x7 paper.
Once printed I like to tape mine to blank cards with washi tape. They also double as decoration to gift wrap!
This photo was used for my parent's anniversary gift. More recently, I printed out a few photos to send out on thank you cards. I used the same concept but printed them slightly differently. I chose to print smaller images so I created a 4x6 collage with two of the same image and then printed them out.
I wanted to try a few new variations so I trimmed each photo slightly differently to see which looks I liked best.
When sending out blog related notes, I like to add my custom made blog address sticker to the envelopes.
Having a good printer helps make printing photos at home much easier. We used a lower end model for many years that served us well--Kodak ESP-3. We currently have a professional model that I love--Canon PIXMA Pro-100.
