Flutterby™! : Printing lots of photos 2005-07-30 19:37:39.27858+00

Printing lots of photos

2005-07-30 19:37:39.27858+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Argh. Well, I couldn't stay away from a printer, the HP died, and we've replaced it with an Epson Stylus Photo R200.

Gives great images when I print from GIMP, once I got the settings right, but given that I now have this stupid thing, what I'd really like is a way for me to take a whole bunch of images from a text file, and batch print them montaged 4 up. Heck, price-wise this is even competitive, the only problem is that at highest qualtiy it's going to run for a long time. So this has to be batched.

lp -dEpson img_3592.jpg prints the incoming raster at like 72 DPI or something. The best thing would be if someone could tell me how to tell it that the incoming image is at 2800 DPI (or whatever it wants, as long as what it wants is 300DPI or better), and I'll write a quick script to montage and re-arrange the images appropriately. Anyone done batch printing like this? Alternatively, anyone have a real quick "This is how you script GIMP to load an image, print it, and exit"?

Uhhh... Nevermind. I can toss this all into a temporary TIFF with its own resolution info. Shouldn't try to script while I'm programming.

Interesting timing: Today Nancy and I take a trip to Mall Central (TJ Maxx, Etc.) and a -NICE- new 'Kodak Photo Printing' store is next door to TJ Max. So I wander in expecting to find -newbie-know-nothing-sales-bodies. Ding, I was wrong. The owner/Manager is Randy Coppinger of 'CPQ' a major photo printing company in Cleveland TN. And they have equipment, papers and processes worth going to.. including printing on canvas (ala Oil Painting). with 4x6 prices at the $0.25 each range, but what blew me away was a 'metallic glossy' print that is 'art quality' stuff. They can do up to 12x18 metallic glossy prints at that location, up to 44" wide in normal formats.. and because of their affiliation with CPQ, they can do special-weird stuff in a day or three via their parent company. Anyway, I ended up playing, spending some time there with their really nice workstations and their well trained staff. - I'll be taking some CD's of images by soon..

Now that I've got this one, I think that 4x5s run roughly $.25 in materials. I was going to try to hold off and just pay the local copy shop for B&W prints too, but that ended up being too expensive and too much of a hassle.

Given that we've got a few hundred prints we want to run, I'm going to set up a script that runs through a list, finds the highest resolution version from my various sets (for instance, my laptop only has medium res images on it, but for printing I'll want to go to the server), lays 'em out 4 up (with appropriate rotation and scaling), and then dumps 'em to the printer.