Welcome to Qimage and the forums, Pops (although you can't be that much older than me!).  Fred & Terry have provided invaluable help to me and many others.  As I've said before, can you believe that these forums are free?

And indeed, help spread the word about Qimage.  Mike can always use a few more customers.

"Pie are round."  Haven't heard that one for ages.  By the way, why do we park in a driveway but drive in a parkway?  [Answer: Because this is the English language.]

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the "why won't it fit?" people.  I can only assume that they crop a photo in a ratio somewhat close to a standard 5x7 or 8x10 and are puzzled why it won't fit perfectly, because I can't believe that someone would (for example) do a square crop and not be able to see that you can't just scale it up and fill a 5x7 or 8x10 perfectly.

I have even seen people complain that their photo-editing program won't let them "stretch" the photo--that it, distort it--just a bit so it will fill the desired space.  (Some programs will, I know).  These people are evidently freehand-cropping close to the desired aspect ratio...but, as the saying goes, "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Glad I'm a Qimage user.  Impossible to crop in the wrong ratio unless you turn off the crop lock.

Valuable thread, here, and the video is quite well-done, too, especially the brief intro explanation of print cropping and aspect ratio.  My occasional reading of photo forums tells me that this basic point is not at well understood.  Over & over again, people complain that their freehand crop cannot be printed to fill a standard paper size without additional cropping, and ask, "What am I doing wrong?"  My question is, does no one remember high-school geometry?

Does it make any difference if you drag the additional images to the queue instead of click-adding them?

I produce similar items (photo note cards, that is).  Thanks for the link to The Box Depot.  Uline is also a good source for stationery boxes and other packaging supplies.

I was about to say...

I occasionally run across an especially good (to my jaundiced tastes, anyway) editorial cartoon on the web...something which it amuses me to print out and stick up on my office wall for a while.  Impressive how good they look enlarged to 8½x11--printed from Qimage, of course.

Appreciate the explanation, Mike.  I had the exact same experience as Jeff and solved it the same way.

Thanks for posting the link, David.  Interesting comments by the respondents, especially those who are just hearing about Qimage and say they will give it a try.

Actually, the "record" Qimage thread is also about borders: http://ddisoftware.com/tech/qimage/border-setup/

I remember reading it, but completely overlooked the "white image" solution, perhaps because I wasn't all that interested in multiple borders.  But this method would be just as handy for laying an image on a decorative background.

Great thread.

Great tip, Fred.  It occurs to me that this method would allow the printing of images with more than the two borders allowed in Qimage.  Specify two borders as desired on your image and two more on a slightly-larger white image.  Repeat ad infinitum.  I'd swear I remember someone in an earlier thread complaining about the two-border limitation.

Okay, my bad.  I picked the dashed black/white line option for marking the print edges, but the line is so fine I couldn't see it on my monitor, and was thinking that perhaps you couldn't mark edges in a "butted together" layout.  Shows just fine on the printout.  Thanks again.

Good point.  Another "set it & forget it" advantage of Qimage.

Some of those test images are here, I think: http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/quality/

I can remember running onto this page very early on (fortunately) in my adventures with Qimage.  I didn't have a high-end camera or printer, but the downloadable test images at the above link made it crystal-clear that you can indeed see the difference between 300 ppi and 600 ppi in the final print...and if memory serves, my printer at the time was a Deskjet 9650.

Back then, I had no idea what I was doing, but I shot photos with my Canon G2, printed from Qimage, and got great results.  What a bargain.

Thanks for this example, Fred.  I do this so seldom that I had forgotten how easy it is.

Any advice on marking print edges (for cutting, that is) in this scenario?  I once set the smallest possible white B+ border on each print and wound up with a hairline between each print.  Wouldn't work too well if one edge of the photo was very light in color, of course.  How do you do this?

This matches my experience when printing severe crops.  Even in a 4x6, you can see the effects of Qimage interpolation in the fine detail.

But I've also printed high-res images full-frame, fit-to-page on 8½x11 with & without interpolation, and I agree that it's difficult if not impossible to see the difference.  Mike notes in one of his articles that with today's high-res cameras, there's less need for interpolation.

However, interpolation is only one of many reasons to use Qimage.  Another recent thread has reminded me that cropping and/or re-sizing can be quite complicated and error-prone in other programs.  In Qimage, it's something I don't even think about.  I just do it, and print.

Your description of your LR workflow makes a great deal of sense, Ken.  If LR's edits are non-destructive, and if you're saving the cropped image in a lossless file format, I don't see how you could be losing quality by cropping in LR.

But you could certainly confirm that with the "test strip" function in Qimage.  Crop your image in LR, open it in Qimage, pick a monster enlargement size, and print a test strip.  Then go back to the uncropped image, crop in Qimage, and print another test strip.  I'd certainly be interested in knowing the results.