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Last updated on

le Friday, June 10 2016

Did you never get head aches when printing digital photos on a paper? The format of the paper is never standard, so it is difficult to center the photo, to find the good margin, and orientation of the photo. Perhaps I am an idiot, but I have wasted a ton of expensive photo papers, bottles of ink, and my time, before I have created ImagePrinz. ImagePrinz has only one function: to print comfortably a photo or a picture on a paper sheet of any size. Only one photo per sheet, and only centered. Since I have been using ImagePrinz, I have not missed one single photo print.

. Launch ImagePrinz and open files

The first step is straight forward: Download the zip file - by clicking on the blue button above - and extract the executable file with a name like imageprinz_3xen.exe into any folder of your choice. Installation is already finished.

To launch the application, double-click on the icon of ImagePrinz in that folder, and the empty window of ImagePrinz will show.

Load one or many files either by clicking on the button Open  , or using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+O , or by drag and dropping files from Windows explorer, or by pasting files from the clipboard (button Paste   or CTRL+V). Be aware that only files with extension jpg, png or bmp will be processed. Files with  extension jpeg are naturally also accepted.

The first button displaying a folder with a heart is also of interest: it loads from the Preferred Folder. By clicking on it or typing F7, it loads automatically all image files from this folder and all its sub-folders. Its useful if the preferred folder points to a removable drive created by a camcorder or a photo camera. Its also very useful if it points to a working folder where you put all images to print. You'll see in the Preferences how to change the preferred folder

There are other commands, shown in the popup menu that is raised by a right click on the application. It is not essentiel to study them, but perhaps will you have some interest for the command Open All, which loads ALL image files present on your system. I recommend to do it at least once if you are curious to discover a huge amount of images hidden in your system. But it may be long and may even end up with an error due to lack of memory. Remember the escape key Esc to interrupt a long loading of files.

Besides the command Empty (or the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+Del) is useful to empty the list of files and go back to the empty window. Like other commands of that menu it is grayed and inactive if no file is loaded, but becomes active if there is at least one file to process.

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. Preparing to print

When one or several files have been loaded in ImagePrinz the empty window is replaced with the Printing Setup window, where the settings for printing the current image may be changed. If several files have been loaded a list of the files is also displayed, and you may browse it to change the current image.

A second window is showing: it is the Preview window, which shows the layout of your image with the current printer settings. It is a strong point of ImagePrinz to show exactly the preview when you change anything like orientation, margin, or the dimensions of the paper sheet. You will see in real time and in WYSIWYG how your image will be printed.

Before printing, the most important setting is to precise the paper format. If the format of the paper sheet is already listed her, then select it. Else, it is easy to create a new paper format. Learn in paragraph 4 how to do it. To have best results, try to enter the precise dimensions of the paper sheet, at least with one millimeter precision.

Other settings are easy to understand and change:

select a margin in millimeters
select an orientation, either Portrait or Landscape
make a rotation either left or right of the image
indicate if the proportions of the image are unchanged (Normal), or if you want to force them in 4x3 or 16x9. It is useful to fix images grabbed from videos DV or DVD when they are given (in Pal) in 720x576, where they should be in 720x405 or 720x540 depending on the widescreen format or not.
choose to make a zoom of your image in order to fill the whole paper (except margins) without changing the required proportions but with cropping, or if the image has to be printed fully with white strips if necessary on some borders.

For each of these settings, check in the Preview Window if the result is OK for you.

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. Printing

Once you have selected the correct paper size and the layout of the image on the sheet, you are going to process the printing.

You may select a number of copies, select a Printer (the available Printer under windows are listed). Then check or not the box Show the Properties before printing.

If it is checked, the standard printing dialog of your Printer will be displayed. The button Print becomes green to show that a dialog will happen before printing. You may modify some other properties, like quality of printing, quality of paper etc.

Caution: do not modify settings already set by ImagePrinz: dimensions of paper, orientation,  printer name... otherwise you will get unexpected results, not necessarily identical to the Preview.

If that box is unchecked, the color of the Print button is peach, and means that the Printing will start immediately after clicking

If everything is OK, it's indeed time to click on that button, provided the Printer is on and the given paper is present in the paper bin. Caution: put always the paper in the direction where the greater dimension is the height, no matter what orientation has been selected.

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. Defining paper formats

When you start using ImagePrinz, the list of paper formats contains 4 items, with dimensions given in millimeters: Photo 165x105, Canon 101.6x152.4, Page A4 210x297, Carton 111x155, A6 105x148,5 . These papers are most common for my use. But yours are probably different. You should always use the exact dimension of your paper sheet and not pact with approximations. That's why it is important to personalize the list of paper formats to include your personal papers. You may also delete some papers never used to simplify the list, or change the order of the papers to put at the top the most frequently used.  To manage the paper formats, type CTRL+B or click on the button on the toolbar and the window of paper formats will become visible:

At the top of the window, you may enter a new format paper by indicating  1 a caption, 2 a width in mm and a height in mm. I recommend to include them in the caption, like "Photo 165x105". It will be easier to remember . Then, 3 click on Add.

 You may also delete an item from the list 4: select it and type Del. To change the order of formats, use the mouse to drag an item to another place in the list 4.

When finished, 5 click on Apply to keep the changes or Abort to return without keeping the changes.

 Caution: when you define new paper formats, you want generally to save them when you quit ImagePrinz to retrieve them at next launch. For that,  you will have to save your preferences (including paper formats) . The paragraph Managing the preferences will tell you how.

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. Changing the Preview

You may indeed increase or diminish the size of the preview.

Remember essentially that the mouse wheel is used to zoom in or out the preview window. The rate of zoom is displayed at the bottom left of the windows.

It is possible to force the size of preview on your screen to match exactly the size of the paper sheet. To get that, you must define a corrective figure because my program cannot know what is the physical size of your screen. Go to the Settings of ImagePrinz by typing F1 (or click on the button ). Then go to tab Preferences.

By giving a value to the corrective coefficient you can modify the physical size of the preview until it fits the physical size of paper. It is a figure with two decimal digits. By default I have set it to 0.80 that fits my screen.

To find out the corrective coefficient for your screen, select a format paper, for instance Photo 165x105 that is the first standard format. Then select any image une image. Set a good margin, for instance 10 mm. Then measure with a ruler the size of the white rectangle containing the image in the preview. You will find a value Height in mm and a value Width in mm. (Width must be the greatest value)

The coefficient will be either x=Height/105 or y=Width/165. In principle these two values should be very close, and you may choose the average of both.

Enter the value in the page of Settings, and then you should verify that the size on screen is the same as the size of the paper sheet, at least when the zoom is equal to 1.00.

Here the width of the Preview is 16.5 cm that is coherent with the size 165 mm of the paper sheet.

And the height is 10.5 cm  according to the height of paper that is 105.

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. Managing the preferences

At first, ImagePrinz does not save anything on your system, and writes nothing to the Registry of Windows. But you may want to retrieve some settings from one session to another, for instance the paper formats, the preferred folder that opens automatically with F7, or the corrective coefficient for adjusting the size of Preview. That's why ImagePrinz prompts you for saving the preferences when closing.

You have the choice:

  * either save them in the Registry. It is the normal mode for Windows.

  * either to save them in an ini file located ion the same folder than the executable  of ImagePrinz. The application is thereby portable, if you launch it for example from a usb key.

  * either not to save them. If you select this choice you will nevertheless be prompted each time you close ImagePrinz.

If you choose to save your preferences (either to the registry or a ini file) , you will no more be prompted by ImagePrinz. But if you delete the saved preferences, by opening the Settings, ( you may type F1 or click on the button ) , then in the tab Preferences check the box Do not save when quit.

If you want to uninstall completely ImagePrinz from your system, go first to the page Preferences in the Settings and check that box. All data that ImagePrinz has eventually written to your system will be deleted, and if you delete now the executable file , no trace of ImagePrinz will remain on your system.

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. Using shortcuts

It may be useful to know some keyboard shortcuts if you get rid of an overdose of mouse clicking. The list of shortcuts is available in the Settings (type F1 or click on the button ), then go to tab Keyboard Shortcuts.

In this list you may find some undocumented shortcuts. For instance the key F5 sends an image to the Image Editing Application set in the Preferences, or by default the default Image Editor of Windows 

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. Printing of pasted images

There is an icing on the cake: one can use ImagePrinz with images that are not saved on the system, but only pasted from the clipboard.

For instance when you surd on the web, you may Copy an image that you find on a site. You may paste it to ImagePrinz (with the button Paste , or the shortcut CTRL+V or using the popup menu). Then you may print it in the same conditions as a picture from a drive or a usb key.

If you want to save it, use the button , or the shortcut CTRL+S.

On the other hand, you may indeed also copy an image selected in ImagePrinz, by CTRL+C and paste it in another application.

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