Printing pictures with Picasa

When you print your own pictures it is good to know something about pixels and megabytes

Pictures are usually stored on your Computer in My Pictures. The filename has at the end a code what tells you what type of file it is. We deal mainly with JPG or JPEG files (Joint photographic Expert Group)

All cameras use the standard JPEG file format. They are widely used because they can be made smaller by compression while still giving an acceptable image.

All cameras have a set amount of pixels 3 to 5 mega pixel cameras are widely used. A mega pixel is 1 million pixels. The more pixels on your photo the higher the resolution and the larger you can print.

If you have a 3mp camera, this means you can make pictures at 2048 by 1536 pixels; 2048x1536= 3.145728 or 3 mega pixels.

It depends on the printer settings which picture size is best. Commercial photo printers are often set at 300 to 360 dpi (dots per inch)

For printing at 300 dpi the ideal size to print at would be 5x7.  ( 5x300x7x300=3.150.000 dpi)

On the left side of this website is a link to an Excel sheet which helps you to convert pixels into print sizes. Just enter the dpi and the width and height of your image in pixels. (link http://www.shortcourses.com/uses/using1-5.html)

To see at which pixel size your photo was taken, within Picasa select the photo you want to print. In the library, on the bar underneath the photos it will show for example 1728x2304. Hold your picture in the Photo Tray and click the print button. In the Picasa print program it shows you at which dpi your printer is set.

You can take a picture with a higher amount of mega pixels than you need for printing. The number of pixels will be downsized to match the number of pixels to print. Removing pixels doesn’t effect the quality a lot. Adding pixels to a photo never looks good.

Picasa has a default option e.g. to print two photos at 5x8 on an A4 sheet. If you want to change that size to 5x7 then click in the menu at the top Tools>options>printing. Click the arrow next to 5x8 and change the size to 5x7.

Within the printing program in Picasa the result of how your pictures will be printed will be shown. By default Picasa is set on Crop to Fit. Picasa will crop the picture to fit the chosen print size if necessary.
If you select Shrink to fit Picasa will add white spaces to the side or top to get the whole picture printed.

In border and text options you can select if you want to print the caption, filename or Exif information and where you want to print it. You can add a caption to your photo in the Picasa editing section.

By clicking the plus you can increase the number of copies you want to make.