POSTERINO 3 - EASILY FORGOTTEN IMPORT FOLDER

I run an active alumni group for my high school.  Every now and then I would make a photo-grid of one particular teacher.  The grid shows photos of the teacher, in chronological order.  It's nice to see someone changed over the years but certain features would stay the same.  I use Posterino 3 on the Mac to make the grid.  The software is great for that kind of thing.  Ideally, this is how it works:

1. Set up a grid.  In the example below, it's a 4x4 grid.
2. Select the folder to import images from.
3. The photos from that folder show in the little gallery to the left of the grid.
4. Either drag individual photos into the grid, or fill the grid up alphabetically, or even randomly.

I love the idea of a template and Posterino has the feature, but documents created from my custom template wouldn't show the images available.  The only way to get the images to show, at least to me, is to carry out these steps:

1. Create new document based on the template.  The grid is there, with the editable years that need to be adjusted depending on what years' photos I have for the teacher.  The years also depend on how long the teacher stayed at my school.  Unfortunately, there are no photos to the left of the grid.  The screenshot shows some images I placed in the source folder.  They should be part of the template file, at least I think they should be, but they are not.
2. Select the source folder by selecting File/Import Images as in the picture.  I would love to avoid this step but it's the crux of the problem.  Even after I selected the source folder, nothing would show up.  Very weird, but that's why we are having this conversation.
3. Create a new document, again!  Use any existing template.  I stick to the standard ones instead of the custom one I made, just to be clear which one is which.
4. Immediately close the new, second document, without saving.
5. Boom!  Somehow the action of creating a new document forced Posterino to load the images in the source folder.  Maybe it's because I'm still using an old Mac, maybe it's a bug that is to be resolved later on.  I am fine with my workaround for now.

Before I came up with this "solution", I worked off folders named for the teacher.  Now, everything has to be in a folder called photo-grid.  As I am done with the project I would copy the folder's content to another folder named for the teacher.  It may work if I change the source folder every time but I think it's easier to see where things are with the five steps above.

Blizzard of December 2010

Click on the collage to see the bigger picture.  Sorry for the delay, but I want to play around a bit with some software I have laying around.  Posterino 1.6 was used to make the 3x5 grid of photos then Comic Life Deluxe was used to add the snowflakes.  Using the Spray feature of Comic Life Deluxe, I was able to overlay the snowflakes of various sizes.  Alas, unlike real life, these flakes are not all unique.

Parlez Vous Francais?

About 500 miles and many hours from Moncton, New Brunswick, we found ourselves in Quebec City in Quebec Province. I remember how French the area is but still found it somewhat amusing as the road signs started to show only French words and abbreviations. No more RD for "road" but instead we have CH for "chemin."

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my three years of high school French, from 24+ years ago, somewhat useful. Even though my spoken French is limited to "bon jour" and "merci", know the days of the week helped greatly with parking. Like any big cities, Quebec City has traffic regulation to keep the flow going. I sure wish I made more use of conversational French, but it's not like every year that I would visit Quebec.

From the few photos I've shared you would think there are not that many of them. On the contrary, among our group 4 minivans, 16 people, 6 or so cameras, we amassed over 20 GB of photos and movies. The group leader probably accounted for half of the number, since he snapped almost everything in sight everywhere he went. Always the techie, I already shared the photos as simple pictures and as a Flash slideshow. For this post, I'm sharing some photos taken in Old Quebec section of Quebec City. The photos are arranged in a neat collage using the program Posterino. The particular template I used only shows photos in landscape mode so for some pictures in portrait orientation I used the photos twice.

Being tourists, we were limited to Rue De Buade, Rue St-Louis, the promenade that leads to the Quebec Citadel, and of course the Citadel itself. Do click on the picture to zoom in a bit.