Does anyone know of software that is capable of printing multiple odd size pictures on a single sheet of photo printer? Ideally this would be a Windows application that would utilize the drivers for my Canon photo printer.
An immediate interest would be printing some images that are roughly 5x8. It is observed that 2 of these would fit nicely on the standard 8.5x11 inch photo paper. I’m aware of software, such as Picasa, that does a nice job of printing multiple pictures on a single sheet of paper. Unfortunately, Picasa seems to expect that the objective is to end up with standard size prints (i.e., 4x6, 5x7). I suppose this is good if you want to use standard size frames but what I want is software that won’t mess with the size of the picture but rather simple position them within the borders and separated from each other.
I suppose it might be fair to say that printing is thought to be a trivial aspect of some more ambitious undertaking. In that, a by-product as opposed to the real purpose of any tool. I was hoping to find something that would simply be a substitute for a capability that is somewhat lacking in the software I’m trying to learn. In fact, so lacking Rawtherapee appears not to even attempt it even though its’ soft proofing is fairly nice. GIMP allows printing but it doesn’t do anything you could call special for printing pictures.
I did consider that I could use GIMP and turn 2 images into one but where does that leave me? G’MIC looks interesting and hopefully I’ll get to the point someday that I’m ready to start learning how to use it but for today I was looking for something much easier to learn.
I suppose when all is said and done, printing multiple images on a single sheet of paper basically comes down to more efficient use/consumption of paper.
I’m pretty familiar with several desk top publishing offerings but so far the thing I like most when it comes to printing pictures is Picasa. It does multiple pictures per page very nicely. Just not the size I might want.
I think the Print Creator tool in digiKam will do what you want. Unfortunately there’s a bug that prevents it from working in the 5.8.0 appimage version I’m using; looks like it’s already been fixed for 5.9 (info here: 388320 – Selecting print layout does not stay selected.) but I don’t believe there’s been a final release of the new version yet. Should be coming soon, though, so you might want to keep an eye out for it. Hope that helps!
QImage (Qimage Ultimate - The Ultimate in Batch Photo Printing Software) is a very good program that is dedicated to printing. It allows you to nest multiple pictures in whatever size and orientation you choose onto any paper size. Plus it has some very good sharpening and tweaking abilities that are aimed at optimizing the “look” of the final print.
It’s not open source but at least its cost is very reasonable for what it offers.
Looks like I may have erred by not saying that, for now, I’m fairly committed to Windows for image processing. I do use Linux but presently those computers are only 32bit and I’ve been scrambling as a result of the various image processing software that is migrating to 64bit. A whole different problem. Even though I’m not doing Linux now I do like knowing about such software. Therefore, thanks anyway.
Picture Window Pro from Digital Light & Color will do it. The current version 7 is free, and version 8 is in preparation. Use the Layout dialog, completely flexible. Then Print Setup dialog should go directly to your Canon driver dialog - that’s what it does for my Epson P800.
I’d like to be able to run this from a secondary (i.e., jump) drive in portable fashion. After running the installer I’m able to copy the Program Files to the jump drive and it does start/run. Although I haven’t done much with it to see how well it runs, I’m not thinking of using it for anything other than this print support. The script I use to start it revises all of the relevant Environment Variable to reference the jump drive but it appears as though the user-data is hard-coded for storing on the system (i.e., C:) drive. Not so good for use on different versions of Windows but also not uncommon.
Any possibility you/someone knows how to run this in a more friendly way for use on multiple systems?
