Best way to print photos

[Donald J. O'Neill]

On Friday 31 March 2006 14:16, Bob Johnson wrote:
>
> In principle, an application feeds it to CUPS, CUPS feeds it to
> GhostScript, and GhostScript uses the HPIJS driver to print it. Or
> something like that.  In practice, I use APSFILTER instead of CUPS,
> and I haven't ever tried to do photo printing from FreeBSD, although
> getting my wife's HP photo printer working with FreeBSD is on my list
> of things to do this weekend, or next weekend, or maybe the weekend
> after that.
>
> The process works for printing JPEGs from web pages on my laser
> printer (although not with HPIJS), and since the HPIJS driver is
> supposed to autodetect photo paper in your printer, I would expect it
> to "just work" for photos if you can print a web page with it.
>
>
> As for a specific application, The Gimp knows something about
> printing photos, but again, I haven't actually done it.   Digikam
> also looks very promising as a photo manipulation tool.  Anything
> that can display it and knows how to print ought to do it (kview for
> example?). I'm sure someone with actual experience can provide a more
> complete answer.    ;-)
>
> So far, I've printed from the Gimp by writing the file to a USB
> thumbdrive, and plugging that into the photo printer.  The Gimp will
> let you define the picture dimensions in inches, which may be
> necessary to get the printing results you want.  Otherwise you may
> end up with a picture that is 1 x 1.5 inches, or one point by one
> point, or a piece of an 8x10 printed on 4x6 paper, or any of several
> other possible defaults I've managed to print in the past.  Some
> printers also do bad things if the image has too many pixels (or
> maybe bytes), so I've sometimes needed to reduce the image resolution
> before printing.
>
> - Bob
> _______________________________________________

Unless the printer was capable of determining what sort of paper it was 
loaded with, I just don't see how the HPIJS driver would autodetect 
photopaper. 

Don