Any Interest in a [PrintLocal] module?
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Scampmd
Joined: 2009-12-15
Posts: 10 |
Posted: Tue, 2009-12-15 13:09
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I'm sorely missing the ability to print photos from Gallery directly to my local printer. Ideally I'd like to be able to print individual photos and/or all photos in the cart directly to a local photo printer (ie on 4x6 glossy paper). Is anyone interested in joining a development project to help make this happen? ScampMD |
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Posts: 4342
I haven't the time to join a project, but I'm curious as to how you intend to make this work.
Posts: 10
A good question. How would you make it work?
Off the top of my head, I can see a couple of possible ways to make it work.
It could be a Firefox add-in rather than one for Gallery but that would only really work for single photos.
There are a number of open source photo applications out there, taking the print functions from one of them and grafting it onto the existing print cart feature could work. Some combination of the two might be best.
Or perhaps a more direct answer to your question:
As an app installed to the local PC that ties into Gallery rather than as a pure Gallery module.
Posts: 4342
Flash, maybe? You could use the G2 image toolkit to resize and/or sharpen the image, adjust colours etc, but how you'd manage the local printer I don't know.
Posts: 10
Flash you say? Hummm....
*google* *google* *flash +printing* *google*
This looks promising:
From the web article: Powerful Printing in Flash:
[url=Test]http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/9970/0/page/1[/url]
Posts: 16504
My question is how would you tie into the local computer's print drivers to create a high quality print?
There appears to be a fair number of people in the ASP world looking for this sort of functionality:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=web+application+print+locally
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Posts: 10
Allowing for the fact that I am embarking on a journey of a thousand miles and I don't even have my shoes on yet, My current thinking is that it will take a custom application loaded on the client PC that interfaces with a Gallery module.
I plan to start by looking at how the existing print function works. It has to package up all the selected photos in a way that the service providers (shutterfly, etc..) can read from to automatically print them at their end.
Also I'll take some time to look for prior art. Other applications that do what I am looking for in whole or in part. For example, pixlr (an add-on to Firefox/IE - http://www.pixlr.com/faq ) that does some of what I am looking for.
How would you approach this problem? I'm very open to suggestions.
Posts: 16504
I've only ever used Gallery to host my photos on my website to display. I've offered a few albums to allow people (friends, family and customers) to print photos I've taken to some of the printing services, but that's it.
I wouldn't even know where to begin with something like this. Maybe flash based, but I'm thinking it may need to be Java based and combined with an application that is installed on each local machine that is is able connect to the local printer(s). However, flash might be able to do that or possibly Adobe Air, I don't know. I'm not a developer and some of the technologies out there I'm really not up to snuff on....
I've never needed/wanted to do something like what you're doing. Maybe, you could develop a "web printing" service where that service ran on your server and printed to your printer. It would basically be a 3rd party service built from scratch, very complex for very little return IMO.
Maybe another option, since you control the entire network this is running on. Your "printing service" could simply copy the full resolution images to a certain directory on your network and you write some other scripts that "watch" this directory, load the images up and print them using some graphics program that accepts command line arguments.
Just a few off the wall ideas as I've never had to deal with this. Well honestly, now that I think about it, actually I did at another job. But that was using a completely different application and different file-types. Though I built in support for JPEG, it supported primarily TIFF and another format I'd rather not name here. And because of some other agreements, there's no possible way I could share any of that code even if you were willing to spend the money to buy the $3500+ piece of software or on the off chance happened to have a legal license of it.
Hmm, would be rather interesting to go back there and make their VB app web based
Oh well, it's a past life I plan to hopefully never go back to.
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