help://print

 

Printing Pictures

With Picasa, you can get great looking prints at home or by ordering online. You can print pictures on any printer accessible from your computer, which includes local and network printers.

 

Print Layout

Picasa can print your pictures in many popular sizes:

 

If the aspect ratio, or length and width of your picture do not exactly match the size you will be printing at, you must choose whether you want Picasa to crop to fit or shrink to fit.  

 

Printer Settings

Printer

Print Settings

Number of Prints per Copy

 

Preview

The preview window uses information from your printer driver to display what your photos will look like when printed.  

 

Note: Picasa has an automatic quality review feature for each picture you print. To get the best possible quality prints, you need to have a high number Pixels Per Inch, or PPI.   

 

To print a good quality uncropped 4x6 picture, you'll need a resolution of at least 150 pixels per inch, or one megapixel (that's 1,000,000 pixels). Anything less than that, and the quality of your print will visibly degrade.  

 

The highest quality professional cameras on the market have a resolution of up to 20 megapixels, which gives a better resolution than 35mm film. Most consumer cameras today are between 3 and 5 megapixels, which will allow you to get a good quality print up to 8x10".

 

Even if you have a great camera, if you crop a picture too tightly, you might wind up with a small image and a poor quality print. Picasa's built-in print quality monitoring will warn you if you're about to print anything with less than 150 PPI.  

 

Froogle™

Froogle™ (Google's online shopping tool) makes it easy to find information about products for sale on the web.   If you need to compare prices for supplies for your printer, click the Froogle button. Picasa will launch a web browser and search Froogle for supplies for your printer model.

 

Also see: Ordering Prints, General Options