How to Print Your Own Mini Instagrams

I love me some Instagram. I think that it’s the perfect combination of creativity and sharing — I love that it’s a social app that’s more than just words. But what I like even more is getting the photos off of my phone and having them in real life, so I can have them around the house.

There’s a super fun project coming up this week for our game night series that involves Instagrams, so I thought it would be cool to do a tutorial ahead of time about actually printing your own mini Instagrams at home! Let me preface this by saying that it’s a super quick-and-dirty method, and it’s best for photos that you’d like to print in a small format. Also, this tutorial has instructions for Mac computers — I’m way more familiar with Macs than PCs! Finally, this tutorial is a little more technical than we usually do, but it’s easy as pie and it’s so having these mini photos all over the place. Let’s do it!

Materials

• computer with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements
• printer
• white cardstock

Make Time: 30 Minutes

Start by going to Pictacular and signing in with Instagram to access your own photos. Click on “My Photos” in the left sidebar. Click on a photo that you’d like to print to enlarge it. Once enlarged, right click on the photo and select “Save Photo As,” and save it to your desktop.

Repeat with all the photos that you’d like to print.

Open Photoshop, and open all of the saved photo files in your photoshop program. In Photoshop, open a new document with the following specifications: 8.5 inches wide, 11 inches tall, 300 pixels per inch, CMYK color mode.

Drag the photos one by one into the new document. Do this by clicking on a photo in Photoshop and dragging it over to the blank document tab. Hover there until the blank document pops to the front, and release the screenshot onto the blank document.

To make sure each photo is the same size, first set your preferences. In the Photoshop menu bar, select Photoshop > Preferences > Unites & Rulers. Be sure that the units are set to inches. Press okay.

Back in the document, select a photo and hit Command + T. An adjustable bounding box will appear around the photo. Adjust the photo by holding Shift, clicking on a corner of the photo, and dragging slightly smaller until the little unit ruler tells you the photo is 2 inches square. Release the mouse and press Return to resize. Repeat and resize each photo.

Once your photos are all on the document and sized, save the document as a PDF and print away. Once printed, cut out your photos and put ’em all over the place! These are also the perfect size for the DIY we have coming up later this week. Have fun, shutterbugs! xoxo