How to Print Family Photos of Differing Sizes

[copacabanagirl]

Hi! I'm new and appreciate reading the posts!

I am launching a project to scan in a multitude of old family photos. I had a friend do one album first and now I am going to do the remaining zillion boxes on my own. I'd appreciate any and all advice in general! I have these tools: Photoshop CS4 Extended, Lightroom 2, an old version of Elements, and an Epson V700 and a large external hard drive. If there are plug ins I should get, I'd love to know what will help! (I'm a hobbyist photographer but not very good with the tools yet at all. Nonetheless, I'm most suited in the family to take on the task!)

My BIG question is this, based on the results from the first photo album. Once you have photos of all ages and therefore sizes and shapes, which are not 4x6 ratio, it is difficult to print them on standard size paper because it will fit to the the long side and crop the rest of the photo. To me, the easiest way to share these photos with others, at least to start with, is to print them all as 4x6 photos at my local favorite developer. I wouldn't mind a black canvas on the sides or top/bottom, but I haven't found a way to do that en masse to get it not to crop out the rest.

How could I make the photos have a canvas of that ratio and the image be resized to fit the entire image within the ratio? (preferably for a folder or more at a time, not a photo at a time...I can do one at a time)

Thank you for any and all advice!

[Steve13]

Considering the cost of printing copies of all the photos, have you considered giving them to family on dvd? For those without computers, maybe using windows photostory (free) or something similar and making slide shows with narration arranged by family, burned onto a dvd playable in their home dvd player on their TV.

[montera]

Hi, Copacabanagirl,
Steve13 gave a sound advice, if there is loads of photos, printing is a huge task. But if you think printing is the way to go, get Qimage for printing and Silverfast Ai Studio for scanning with the V700 and you should be fine. Qimage allows you to determine different print sizes on one sheet of paper.

Peter

[copacabanagirl]

Thanks to both of your for your replies. I undoubtedly will give the photos to my cousins on DVDs, but if they want to print them they will probably run into the same problem as me. (And my dad's generation wouldn't know what to do with even a TV-ready DVD.) I want to print a copy of them for myself as I prefer paper (old fashioned, I know!) and put them in a 4x6 photo album more as a catalogue of the collection for myself - that I can share in the book or as photos I can spread out on a table and people can pick up and look at during a family reunion.

For me it's easiest to print the collection and show my family what's in it. I don't mind if it has black bars on the sides or the top...just would like to get the whole project printed. (We can always choose the best few to tinker with the size and print individually.) I don't print my photos myself - I prefer to use Costco and they don't have a setting to run them through that doesn't expand to fill the entire 4x6 regardless of what gets chopped out. But also if anyone knows somewhere that it's a choice of how to print that can default to "whole picture" instead of "fill the paper" I would be happy to use another source for printing too.

Does anyone know if IrfanView will resize to fit the whole picture within 4x6 ratio - I was going to look there next.

Thanks again for the help!!!

[Mike]

Have you considered laying the originals out so they fit an 8X10 or bigger print size?

Have done this for several customers, layout the originals in groups either by the content or the date, either capture the images with a camera or a scanner, import to PS do whatever needs to be done then just print the 8x10's as a page.

Easy to do, cuts down the total number of pages by a bunch since some pages may have 4 or so separate images while others may have 10 or 12, since we reproduced all the images at 1:1.

Just a thought.

[copacabanagirl]

Thanks - no I hadn't thought of that. I'll consider that option!

[TommyO]

Originally Posted by copacabanagirl

Does anyone know if IrfanView will resize to fit the whole picture within 4x6 ratio - I was going to look there next.

Yes and no. IrfanView is very flexible. It will resize multiple files in a batch mode and allow you to pick the actual height or width. You can even change the aspect ratio (or choose not to maintain it) during the resize. But, that would be odd. So, here is what you would do... if you want to resize a batch of different sized prints to fit to 4x6 at 300 dpi, then you would pick the maximum height to be either 4 inches, or 1200 pixels. Pictures that are only 400 pixels high will be up-sized, pictures that are 1800 pixels high will be down-sized. You can control many other characteristics of the batch as well.

I have attached a screenshot of the batch resize dialog FYI, with most options turned on just so you can see them better (not that you would use them as selected). The "canvas" option is not quite what you may need. It actually adds a symetrical border of any width and color around the image edge; it does not fill the background, which could be useful.

[copacabanagirl]

Thanks for the help! I'll try that!

[Steve13]

If you're not committed to 4x6, you can print photos 4 to a sheet with the default Windows Gallery (Vista) or Image viewer (XP). They come out about 3.5 x 5. Also Photoshop will print multiple images to a sheet without cropping with File>Automate>Contact Sheet.

[viosca]

There is image magick. It is a command line tool. It is not friendly to use or learn, but you can do just about anything with it. I wrote a perl scrpt which calls imagemagick. It reads in images, and foreach, determines the best orientation for the image (landscape/portrait) rotates it, annotates the image with the caption information from the image EXIF info fields, fills the rest of the image with a background color of choice, adds a border of selected width (allows for printer bleed), and resizes the image to the selected width/resolution. To use my script, you need to have perl and image magick installed. Some perl programming knowledge might be needed for tweaks. I call it "The Captionator". I wrote it because I wanted to keep all annotation information with each image rather than in a separate database/files.
I use irfanview for editing the EXIF info fields as I find it to be the most efficient at it.
Be careful when using irfanview if you use it for bulk image editing and if you use custom/embedded icc profiles. I seem to remember there were issues.

[copacabanagirl]

Viosca,

This sounds like it would perfectly solve the dilemma - I'll download perl and image magick. Then may I use your Captionator script?

[igot2pman]

Going along with TommyO, you could make the image the right size. Then you could put a black (or whatever) background behind it. You can make all this into an action then automate it to do a batch process.

Costco will also print with boarders but I don’t know if they will automatically resize a 5x7 to fit in it.

I made an action <for CS3/CS4> (inside the zip file) for you that will make it in grey, black, or white boarder automatically into a 4X6. It will resize any original sized picture into a bordered 4x6. I know of no other way to do this other then separating the Tall pictures and wide. You have to separate the pictures into a wide and tall folder.

1. Then run a script that selects the tall or wide folder. (File>>script>>image processor)
2. Set it to save in a new location, new folder.
3. Save as JPEG quality 12
4. Check run action, action folder name "4x6 boarder maker", select correct color and tall or wide.

Hope it helps,
-Keven

[viosca]

Originally Posted by copacabanagirl

Viosca,

This sounds like it would perfectly solve the dilemma - I'll download perl and image magick. Then may I use your Captionator script?

Ok, I've been doing some clean-up and tests on it and I think it's just about ready. As soon as the testing is done and if everything's ok, I'll post it here and to my acct at CPAN.org.

-Randy

[viosca]

Copacabanagirl,
here is The Captionator perl script.

There are installation instructions at the top of the file.
If you type
captionator.pl -man

you will get a mini manual.

-help will get you an options list.

Let me know how it works.

-randy

[viosca]

Here is some example output for those input test images I sent before.

-Randy