Printing Photos for your Happy Planner on the Canon Selphy

Ever since I was bitten by the planner bug, I have obsessively thought about how I want to use my Happy Planner. After a couple of months of just decorating it and not wanting to soil it’s beauty with my hand writing, I knew I wanted to use it functionally with typed out appointments or stickers of events, but definitely nothing with my writing. But I wanted that extra pop for going back later and admiring it all when the year is over. So I decided I “needed” a small printer for downstairs in our house. I have a Canon Pixma MG7720, which I LOVE!!! And I have a large format HP Printer, which is fairly old and hard to get ink for so I only use it for 12x12 printing now. The problem is, they are upstairs in my craft room and I rarely get time up there. Most days are spent downstairs or outside with my son, so I wanted to find a compact alternative.

NOTE: I am not affiliated with any of these companies and I am not posting any links just to make sure there is no issue or concerns about advertising. This is just my personal opinion and experience!

A co-worker recently got the HP Sprocket and loves it. She tested a few photos on it and showed how the size is bigger than the weekly Happy Planner slots, which I thought might bother me, but I figured I could just trim it down. Once I started shopping around, though, I found that the Sprocket (and other min-printers of that size) were somewhat pricey, especially for the paper. Now, I did consider that you don’t have to buy ink, but I wanted a little more versatility and hopefully a little more affordable.

So for my anniversary, my awesome hubby bought me the Canon Pixma, which I now have set up downstairs in our guest room. When I want to print something from my phone, I just run around the corner, turn it on and print. Tada!

So I ran some test prints to see what size would fit the Happy Planner squares and after a few test runs, I wrote up a tutorial for  a few of the ladies on the Facebook Happy Planner group that I thought I would also share here. 

This is going to be long but hopefully helpful for anyone looking at the Selphy that wants to easily print from their phone for memory planning.

So I am using my iphone to print photos to the Selphy and used the FramePic app to utilize a template. I am using the 3:2 ratio in the pic frame app. The template is on the 4th page, 3rd row, 3rd over. It has 4 across and 2 up slots.

Here's my lessons learned. First, pic frame puts in a border so they were printing too small for the classic boxes with the frame, once cut. So I removed the frame by going to Style, then sliding the width bar all the way to the left and I saved it and reprinted.  

That ended up printing perfect 1.5 x 2 photos that work great with the weekly boxes IF you have a thick washi. Photos to follow.

Here's the issue - the paper that came with the Selphy is perforated. While the Selphy is printing 4x6, the paper perforations make it shorter than six inches and cuts off each edge, probably to make it sized to true digital is my guess. But the problem it creates for me is I can't fit 8 photos on one sheet like I had hoped because the 4 photos on the outside slots get cut off.

I also wanted to try and find a size that would fit the full weekly box so I did some playing around. PicFrame allows you to manipulate the boxes a bit so after some trail and error, I used the same template and found if I dragged the middle frame bar down until it measured 165, (a number shows near the bar as soon as you hold your finger on it and start dragging) and then removed the width of the frame so there is no white in between the photos, and that made perfect 1.5 x 2.5 photo slots in the first row. Problem again is that the outer two photos get cut off by the perforation.

So I did find the perfect box size in PicFrame is 98x165 but I have yet to find a template that I can manipulate that gets three boxes that size that will fit within the print range of the perforated paper. I will definitely post if I find a solution. In the mean time, I either have to accept that the outer ones are smaller, or accept that I will waste some paper by only printing in the middle two sections of the template. My other solution is to possibly cut my own photo paper to fit or see if I can find non-perforated photo paper that will fit the Selphy cartridge. I am hoping that latter option pans out but at least I know I have options if needed.

Here is a shot of the difference in the width between a photo in the middle of the print and a photo on the outside that gets cutoff by the perforating. Not huge, but enough to show white around the edge in the Happy Planner box. 

And here is a photo showing the height difference of the original template height on the right and the stretched template on the left for the longer version.

And a look at how each fits into the Happy Planner weekly boxes.

To me, the $100 price tags with cheaper refill paper and still being able to print a few photos per sheet was still A better deal than the sprocket or other mini printers I was looking at. I am still really happy I got it and I am sure I can make it work!