Show HN: A tool for arranging photos for home-printing without wasting paper(dj-louw.github.io)
dj-louw.github.io
Show HN: A tool for arranging photos for home-printing without wasting paper
https://dj-louw.github.io/photo-collage-printer/
2 comments
Love the idea of a lightweight, offline, web-only tool! I’ve run into the same frustration with printing multiple photos efficiently. Curious—how did you handle the PDF layout logic to minimize paper waste? Any interesting tricks with CSS or JS you’d recommend?
It's manual layout. There's nothing auto in there. You add your pictures, and then arrange, crop, rotate and resize as you see fit.
I chose this approach as I reckoned I would know best what I want to with each photo I'm printing: maybe one needs to go into a specific-sized frame while another needs to fit a blank space in a scrapbook or something. Auto-layout will probably get it wrong, which will require manual intervention anyway.
Click the link and check it out - I have some sample photos loaded so you don't have to upload your own.
I chose this approach as I reckoned I would know best what I want to with each photo I'm printing: maybe one needs to go into a specific-sized frame while another needs to fit a blank space in a scrapbook or something. Auto-layout will probably get it wrong, which will require manual intervention anyway.
Click the link and check it out - I have some sample photos loaded so you don't have to upload your own.
This web-app allows for the arranging, resizing and cropping of photos on a sheet of paper, after which a printable PDF is generated which can be sent to the printer.
This way, you can run of a batch of photos in a single go, and minimize paper wastage, which is nice if you have the extra-premium photo paper loaded in the printer.
Up to now I've used a paid app for this when on my android tablet, but I was never happy with how it worked. Things like Word or other document/image editors felt too cumbersome for quickly setting up a batch of photos to print. So I decided to build my own.
It's super simple to use, mobile friendly (sort of), local only, offline capable with no external dependencies or a backend. I'm enamored with using web technologies for simple tools like this, that can be bookmarked and used on any device. The sad reality though is that many of these tools (these days) require an account, your data makes a round-trip to someone else's server or they apply a watermark to the output if you don't pay.
I'm happy to put this out for free, for the world to use. And I have zero desire to update or productise this any further. I look forward to solving my next asinine problem in this way, by creating some home-baked software that will probably see a peak user count of 1.