Photo printing software

Any recommendations?

[Syzygy]

Can't remember the last time I actually printed out any of my photographs - it's probably three or four years ago. Had one shortlisted in a local competition just recently and thought it would be nice to do an edge-to-edge print on A4 glossy and have it framed.

I used to use Epson's Easy Print software. However, that was on a different computer. Downloaded it again today and the damn thing crashes continually.

Any recommendations on alternatives, especially free ones?

Thanks,

Syzygy

[weeks]

This is going to be an oddball reply, but do a web search on a local photo shop's web site. In my area, they are offering an online service that does a very professional job. Real photos. And the prices are weirdly cheap. Considering the cost of paper and ink, it's better than "free." 8by10 for $2. Duh!

And, if you click on advanced, you can do borderless, etc. You get the prints delivered to the shop the next day. We can get them at our supermarket, too, just like the ol' days.

Kodak, of course, wants to help, too.

[travelin cat]

Do you have a Costco near you? They have a great service where you can bring in almost any type of media and they will print it out for you.

[Syzygy]

No Costco here in the Netherlands. Have to say that my experiences of high street printing has not been good. Tried it a few times when I lived in London with Snappy Snaps and another chain whose name I've long forgotten and was disappointed with the results. That was a number of years ago and since that time took to home printing.

Played around with iPhoto last night - an application I forsook around the same time as the high street photo printers - and it did do what I wanted, albeit rather clumsily.

The layout options seem to be restricted to half a dozen templates, and there's no way that I can see to resize or position images at will.

Printed photos on both A4 high gloss and archival matte and am happy to see that the printer is doing its job.

As I prefer to print from home, any software recommendations would still be welcome.

Syzygy

[swa66]

Looks like you want something that allows you to do page layout on a mac ?

Probably the easiest option is "pages" it comes with Apple's iwork package and allows you to drop pictures onto a page at will and then print it.

To crop images: preview can help you with that: use "select" to select the part you want and then Tools/Crop .... and save that

If you want more: There's always Adobe CS4 ... but it's far from free, even far from affordable.

[weeks]

I recommend that if you have recent release of Microsoft Office for Mac, try the Publishing Layout in Word and import the image to a Word document. Click on the image and you can do an amazing amount of adjustment in Publishing side of Word.

[swa66]

Why office ? It's about the worst solution to do page layout there is available.

pages is much better at it and is much cheaper.

[weeks]

I had a one on one demo of Pages by an Apple rep and I was impressed. But, I pulled out my Mac Book Pro and fired up Word in Publishing format (this is important) demoed to him why I liked it better for moving art & photos around on my own templates. We called it a draw, but in Publishing format, the more recent versions of Word works well. Yes, it used to be awful and if you try to do move pictures around in regular Word, forget it.

As I have said before, Word is what the world uses and I live in the world. I'm not out to change this aspect of the world. If you only have to make yourself happy, Mac's Pages is a excellent product.

[timster]

GIMP is a free image manipulation app (like Photoshop) that might help you out.

[gimp.org ]