Recently I was given a Hiti photo booth dye sublimation printer which is now configured as wireless. It came with a windows print driver and a software print utility. Their print software makes it rather difficult to easily select photos and only recognizes jpeg or tif formats not raw. The printer uses roll papers and only prints 4x6 or 5x7 formats and I thought I would be restricted to their printer software since I thought that only their software would provide the proper communication with the printer. I planned to use the printer as a means to easily and quickly print images of all photos shot - although I do print multiple images per page on the higher end fine art printers, the time per page is relatively long.

So I thought I'd attempt trying QImage as alternative software. I can report it appears to work great! QImage defaulted to the 4x6 roll format automatically and passed jpeg, tif and raw to the printer without any issues. I suspected it would. The raw images can be sent directly since QImage handles it without the need to convert every one to tif as would be required using the Hiti software.

Mike your software always surprises me with its compatibility and functions.

Mike, I can confirm what he is seeing. I select the utilities, etc. get to the save screen, select save then the save dialog screen just closes and checking the folder- it is empty.

On some screen lists in QImage, such as folder selection on the left side, the mouse wheel provides the ability to scroll up or down the folders. But on others, such as media size, the scrolling seems to be prevented. The scroll slider is very thin on the media size and it would be easier to use the mouse wheel. Is there a way of activating the wheel scroll option?

Mike, I know this topic of fit to paper is well covered but I found this interesting, maybe it is already mentioned and I missed it. I defined a 12x12 media size and it was approx 11.7x11.7 printable. Auto-crop is off on the following, I placed a 4x6 image and selected fit to page and it gave me the expanded image filled to the vertical edges with approx 2 inch white space on the top and bottom which is what I expected. I placed another 4x6 and selected fit to paper, it gave the same image as the fit to page ( two inch white space top and bottom). I selected fit to paper again on the same image and it filled the entire printable area.
Basically, it took two clicks to fit to paper. Perhaps it is the 12x12 format that caused this but it would be confusing to someone who is expecting it to fill the paper on the first click. It is as though it needed an intermediary crop to fit to paper.

Thanks for the explanation, it really makes sense now. I understand the fit to page and fit to paper may be changing in the wording, I'm excited to see what you come up with to make it easy to remember. I thought of it as 'fit to print size' as I specified the size of the print, and fit to paper was obviously the size of the media that was loaded. When you're using roll paper it's hard to think of pages or paper.

Mike, Excellent explanation, however, occasionally even when autocrop is turned off, when I select 'print to page' a small crop icon is visible at the bottom in the image. When clicked on, it says do you want to remove cropping (I think that is what it says).  Doesn't happen all the time, I'm not sure what this indicates or what is means as the image appears correct. There must be a set of conditions that is met that causes this, so is this one more item to keep in mind when fitting to page?

Mike, it's such a great software program, I'm amazed it does all that it does already and so well. The problem is, with everything else to concentrate on when your formatting the images, it is so easy to forget to turn it off before hitting the print button. I thought of it more as an permanent option like the skin colors. And when the paper is $4 a sheet this can be an expensive mistake. I still consider QImage a marvel at all it does. The new version 2023.100 is fantastic.

I hope I'm not embarrassed and the option already exists and I'm not aware of it. But I have two large screen monitors and usually use the darkroom skin in a darkened working environment. When working with 24 inch roll paper in QImage, the monitor screen is a blast of white light until the roll begins to fill up as the smaller print images are added. Or as each new page appears, the blast of white light happens. It may be helpful at times to have an option that the paper area appear as a fairly dark grey background rather pure white, with the grid lines simply a bit darker than the grey background.
Just a comment for consideration.

Thanks for all the feedback. Especially to Mike for that little gem of a tip to look at the crosshatching. That makes it easy to see the status. Although I see it also shows in the popup information dialogue box if you hover over the page layout, but not when you hover over the actual image.
I fully appreciate how the autocrop functions, however, coming from a wet darkroom from many years ago, it took some time to adjust to autocrop as I always think of cropping as a reduction in size. It used to drive me crazy as depending on the print size and aspect ratio, the image would look fine, then in another print size (different aspect ratio) the image could be truncated on two sides. Since I usually don't crop to a specific aspect ratio, I print to the full cropped image size.

Don't misunderstand, I think Mike has a super super product in qImage. It is so flexible. This auto crop is the one area where I've been frustrated in that I seem to miss it being on when I wanted it off.
I see the manual save option that you reference will reset it to startup conditions. I will use that for now as a method to reset the option. That would be more excellent if there were a menu icon key that activated it so it would be similar to the locked gear.
Thanks for your help, I didn't see manual update until you mentioned it.

Well, I was trying to explain that I've been caught a few times with wrong formatted prints. I was using the auto crop and closed QImage, when opening the next time auto-crop is on and if you don't see it, the print may not be correct.
It's easy to miss if you overlook the setting.  So, in the one post and picture it was mentioned about the gear with the lock which is on the menu bar. But in version 2023.100 I don't see the gear on the menu bar.
I was asking if it was removed in this update.

I'm using 2023.100 version and there doesn't seem to be a gear icon on the menu available as shown in the screen image.
Can anyone tell me if it was dropped or is there a way to place it on the menu bar?

Thanks Mike -- the reply was very informative and has cleared up many questions.

As I use QImage (a great software package), questions arise that I can't find answers for. I was watching a video and it spoke about QImage printing as if 16bit (a reference to Canon XPS driver) although Windows only supports 8bit printing. So I was searching and saw a check box option in QImage which allows applying dithering to print output, profile output or both.
I printed my profiles through the Adobe utility with color correction turned off.
It seems I should have printed the profiles through QImage to make sure any color differences due to the 16bit enhancement is passed to the profile printouts before reading the color strips.
I have to assume there would be color differences in the profile charts based on the options which can be selected in QImage. Then another question arises, why turn it off for profiles but leave it on for prints since it seems the icc profile will have color differences and may not match for soft proofing.

If I need more profiles, I'd like to make sure they are done the most accurate method. Any ideas?

I've been struggling with a setup issue and can't seem to find the right combination to make it work. I have an Epson printer and the printer driver appears to leave a margin at the beginning of the page, so my setup is, I have specified Letter size paper and at the top of the screen QImage reports a page size of 8.2x10.33 which is ok. I am trying to put a 6.5x9.75 print on this letter size with equal spacing on the physical page. It has IntellCenter selected by default, so the print is centered within the printable area but there is a wider gap at one end due to the margin. If I select Manual instead of Ic, I can move the print image toward the top so that it is physically centered on the page with equal spacing at top and bottom. I tried saving this as a layout template, but it doesn't seem to retain the Manual setting but reverts back to Ic.
Is the answer to always select Manual and make the position adjustment before printing? Or did I miss a step in setting up the template?


Update--
I have found the answer -- IntelliCenter seems to place the image centered on the physical page. Some downloaded jpegs that I used seemed to give inconsistent results.