PRINTING

One of the key features of Photo Organizer is the ability to print labels and brochures. So far two formats are supported, Post Script (PS), and Portable Document Format (PDF). In fact the system is able to generate PS documents only, and a third party utility is used (ps2pdf) to convert the PS document into PDF.

PRINTING LABELS

First select some of the photos, by checking the appropriate checkboxes, then select the Label item in the Print combo box, and press the Print button. This will lead you to the label selection dialog, where you can select from over 60 labels. Should you not find the label you are looking for you can create you own custom labels using Your Profile.

After selecting a label, the appropriate label dimensions are updated in the dialog, which can be manually adjusted if needed. You can also customize the information printed on the label; you might not want to include the barcode, or the shooting data. Uncheck those items you don't want to be printed.

In case the selected photos have duplicates the system will list all duplicates so that the user can decide which dupe(s) to print. After setting up the printing dialogs, press Print and the browser will start downloading the printout in the selected format. In case you have a helper application (Acrobat Reader or Ghostview) installed and configured for your browser, the hepler will start and display the printout. Use the helper print features to print the document on a local printer.

Note that for the ps2pdf utility will not convert the PS document into an exactly scaled PDF document. The PDF document is always slightly smaller and that causes trouble when printing labels. For now, to make sure that you print with the dimensions you want I advise you to chose the PS format when printing labels. Today, all printers come with a PS interpreter so all you have to do is to send the file to the printer, which will automatically recognize it and print nice labels for you.

If the barcode is selected to appear on the printout for each photo two labels will be printed. The first one will consist of the CODE-128B bar code encoding the photo unique identifier with a space (to ease the input of multiple codes when using a bar code scanner), the photo unique identifier in human readable format in the left bottom corner and the storage identifier in the bottom right corner.

The other label will have the copyright information, some of the shooting data, and the beginning of the the caption printed on (depends on the size of the label and the length of the caption).

PRINTING BROCHURES

Printing brochures is very similar to printing labels, except that rather selecting the label, you have to select a brochure format and a layout.

You can select from a basic brochure layout (paper size, margins, number of rows, orientations), the rest being the same as for the label printing. The same way as for labels, you can select what information you wnat to print in the brochure. These include the color image, barcode, the shooting data and the photo caption.

Depending on how many columns are you printing on a page, the photos used in the document will be derived from the thumbnail or from the medium sized image. In case you use only one column, the medium sized image will be used, which provides enough resolution for a decent printout. This however will also increase the size of your document. Therefore when creating albums consider the number of images you include in one document, as well as the layout.