Best way to print photos

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <200603311441.57084.donaldjoneill at gmail.com>
            "Donald J. O'Neill" <donaldjoneill at gmail.com> writes:
: 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. 

It doesn't.  However, one of the CUPS settings is 'paper type' and
'paper size'.  There's also print quality.  I can set those manually
and CUPS claims that the settings changes have taken effect.

Warner