How Do I Print Photos?

Question

Other than for Windows in Ubuntu there are no fancy utilities provided from printer manufacturers to print photos. I am aware of Gnome Photo Printer and of Photoprint, the first being easy to handle, the latter having more options. However I wonder if there are any other or maybe even better alternatives (including plugins) to perform the following tasks:

• Print photos in the best photo-resolution the driver offers
• Adjust paper size for standard values of photo papers
• Choose paper tray if the printer has more than one
• Print out multiple photos on one page including mixed sizes (grids)
• Multiple prints with same settings
• Borderless printing if the printer is capable of this

Any additional options like pre-processing for color correction or noise reduction would be nice to have but are not so essential.

According to this spec it seems not to so easy to accomplish the simple task of printing photos.

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Indeed all applications I have gone through have major drawbacks that make printing photos almost impossible. Below I will list what put me off using them for photo printing:

• For obscure reasons CUPS only offers printing at 600 dpi the most.
• Gnome Photo Printer: no thumbnails, no grids, not available for 14.04
• Photoprint: does not keep settings, GUI broken, no standard photo size, no thumbs, not available for 14.04
• Eye Of Gnome: no multiple pages, no grids
• Gimp + Images Grid Layout: far too many steps to finally find that prints are always different to their previews.
• F-Spot: no grids
• Picasa 3 via Wine: no grids, very few fixed paper sizes, 300 dpi only
• flPhoto: strange GUI, no thumbs, no printer settings, did not print at all
• TurboPrint: proprietary paid software with a shameless high price and obscure paid-only update policy - but it does the job quite well (even includes reporting Inklevels from a network printer) for many Canon, Epson, Brother and HP printers. Alas, I am not willing to pay $40 for a basic feature I expect to just work.
• Windows: Ooops - everything works fine! But I want Ubuntu to do this!

After half a pack of ink cartridges and half a pack of photo paper cards I am getting tired of testing. At least Gimp and Picasa looked promising but both don't keep their promise when it comes to printing. I'd already be happy to quickly print a few photos with EOG if bug #80220 was fixed - but it's still on "wishlist".

Solution 1

F-Spot can make some of the things you are asking for (though not all)

On the other hand, and though this is not an answer to your question, but eventually, and hopefully, it will be. There's a project called DarkTable, which is being developed as a substitute of Lightroom. The print interface, however, is still in the list of future features, but it's promising. More info: http://darktable.sourceforge.net/features.shtml

Edit:

What about gthumb?:

1. Up to 600 dpi
2. No standard sizes, but customizable ones
3. Paper tray selection in the print dialog (cups, I think)
4. Can do grids, but you can't mix grid sizes (you can mix photo sizes, but within the cell grid -meaning they will be adjusted to the cell size, but you can't select each image's size-)...
5. Guess you can print several times with same settings (you can't save settings, tho)
6. Can't test the borderless, as my printer is not capable of doing such a print :(. GThumb's dialog does allow you to set margins to 0, but I can't test it...

Try Geeqie, too...

1. Unlimited dpi
2. Same as before, you can customize paper size
3. You can't select paper tray (a workaround is print in Postcript, open the .ps file and print with the printer settings dialog customized to your likings)
4. You can print images in a grid, too (all cells same size, as before)
5. You can keep the settings for several prints
6. Again, can't test the borderless printing, but it allows you to set margin to 0... so maybe?

Have you tried Digikam?

Solution 2

I just searched for a simple way to print multiple photos on one page and found that LibreOffice Draw was the best application for my requirements.

You can select the resolution, the page size and even the individual image size, you can place the images manually or in a grid.

All the other programs I tried (including but not limited to: geeqie, gthumb, imagemagick, photoprint, gimp) didn't work for me.

Solution 3

You can Try showFoto (install it from the software center).

Solution 4

Have you looked at shotwell? (I havent looked down through everything so forgive me if it doesnt have what you want)

Solution 5

I suggest digiKam software. I think it has most of features one photographer may need.

Good luck,

View more solutions

Comments

[Admin]

what do you use on windows?

[Admin]

@Alaukik: I use "Canon Easy Photo Print" running on XP for my old Pixma. Both, Windows and the Canon Printer are installed for this single task only. I have not given up the hope to eventually get rid of Windows if only I could print quality photos with Ubuntu (and a Brother printer).

[Admin]

I wouldn't hold my breath on that EoG bug...it's been pending for 4 years

[Admin]

@aking1012: sure, it will probably never be fixed :) this was just to illustrate how little would be needed, and it was mentioned in the Improve Photo Printing Spec.

[Admin]

Your Gnome Photo Printer and Photoprint links are broken.

[luri]

..and there's always the option to set up a layout that fits your needs with Inkscape (btw.... it shouldn't be so difficult to implement some kind of "svg" template to print photos....)

[Takkat]

Nice application for KDE indeed, if a bit overloaded to my taste. Unfortunately after installing half of KDE due to dependencies one of these managed to somehow mess up my sound system - too bad. Printing of photos did not work at all in my GNOME setting (plain empty sheet of photo paper instead). However apart from that quite a lot of features I asked for pretend to be there (hard to test when it's not printing).

[Takkat]

Thank you for this suggestion. ShwoFoto is included in digiKam -therefore same problems when it comes to install it in GNOME.

[Vincenzo]

Hi Takkat ! I used to use various apps for managing of digital photos. I noticed that digiKam is feature-saturated software, even I had to install KDE environment :)

[Takkat]

Geeqie is promising indeed :) Needs changing the standard printer settings to print photos on photo cards. The lpr feature might do this for me but so far no success to persuade my printer to print.

[luri]

If you don't mind (well, you sure do :) ) one more step, you can save your layout to PostScript and then print the generated .ps file.

[Takkat]

Thank you for pointing to this application. Printing capabilities of Shotwell are rudimentary the most (e.g. selecting more than one image greys out Print... in the File menu). I was able to test 0.5. only. Did this improve in later releases?

[Jim Nelson]

Although lots of of improvements have been made to Shotwell since 0.5, our printing has not advanced much. We definitely would like to add those features at some point!

[Jim Nelson]

We recently accepted a patch from Nikola Radovanovic that gives Shotwell the ability to print multiple photos as well as multiple photos per page. This feature will be in 0.9, coming soon.

[David Foerster]

Welcome to AskUbuntu! Could you please write full sentences to make your answer more easily understandable?

[congusbongus]

F-Spot has been discontinued.

[RobertG]

On Ubuntu 20.04: gthumb kindof worked, but wants me to adjust each image separately. I can work around that by adding captions (file name, size...) until the size checks out - and it still gets printed bigger than I configured in mm. But close enough for my purposes.