Wallet Photo Generator

What's it for?

Save money buying wallet photos of your digital images. If you've ever uploaded photos to a photo printing service, you've seen the option for wallet prints. Typically wallets will be printed on a 4x6 or 5x7 sheet, and you can expect to pay a premium for this sheet. This is annoying since the paper used is exactly the same paper used for much less expensive single photos on 4x6 or 5x7 paper.
For instance one photo printing service I sampled when writing this page offers the following pricing:

• 4x6: $0.15
• 5x7: $0.99
• Wallets: $1.79 (a sheet of 4 copies of the same image at 2"x3" on a 5x7 print)

Whoa. Wallet photos cost 80 cents extra per sheet!?! So I originally created the MakeWallet utility to save money - by pre-creating the wallets in a 4x6 image I can get wallet prints for as little as $.15 a sheet, which is a huge discount!
Good with your personal photo printer too: Recently I picked up HP's PhotoSmart 385 4x6 photo printer. This printer can generate a 4x6 sheet of wallet prints, but only if you're printing images directly from a camera card. Since I usually print from Windows, however, I'm lacking some benefit from this feature since Windows' built-in wallet printing only works on 8x11 sheets on traditional letter-size printers. Once again, MakeWallet comes in handy.

How do I use it?

Easy...

1. Run the application from the Start Menu
2. Find the image you want to make wallet images for
3. Drag the file into the "Files" section of the application
4. Decide whether you want a 4x6 image or a 5x7 image and click the appropriate option
5. Click "Start". You'll see an hourglass while the program is doing its work.
6. After a moment Look in the directory you dragged the image from. You should find a file called something like "Wallets 4x6 (DSCN0944,DSCN0945,DSCN0946,DSCN0947).jpg"

That's it. Upload the generated file to your favorite printing service or send it to your photo printer.

What other cool things does it do?

Rotate and Crop: Images are automatically rotated and cropped to fit the 2x3 aspect ratio.
Run from Shortcut Menu: Right-click a .jpg or .png image in Windows Explorer and choose "Make Wallets" as a shortcut to run the program quickly.
Fill a sheet with image or many: Give it a single image or multiple images to generate a sheet filled with identical images or a sheet of different images. The program decides how to fill the sheet depending on whether you give it just one image or more than one.

• If you give it more than 4 you'll get multiple sheets generated, one for each set of 4.
• If you give it more than 1 but not a multiple of 4 (like 3 or 6) you'll end up with empty space on one of the sheets.

The cool thing about this feature is that if you're sending out multiple wallet photos to friends and family you can save yourself time and rubber bands by sending everyone a sheet of unique photos they can cut themselves, rather than cutting them yourself and dividing up all of the tiny pictures
Make a sheet of 16 1" x 1.5" images: This is a great tool for the scrapbooking person in your house. Just generate a sheet of wallet images, then generate a sheet of wallets for that. You'll end up with 16 images to a sheet, and when cut out they fit nicely in a slide mount or are easily cropped to interesting shapes to add more interesting photos to a scrapbook page. You can feed the output of the MakeWallet software back through it as many times as you wish. Good luck with the scissors though - cutting 64 itty-bitty pictures from a 4x6 image isn't my favorite way to pass the time...

Updates

Support for variable number of images: You can choose to put 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, or 16 images on a sheet.
Support for 8x10 wallet sheets: You can now generate a sheet of up to 16 images for a 8x10 sheet.