If talking precisely from the unclog perspective, you must be right. However:
1. As far as I understand, the majority of people use this function in order to save ink from a purging process of their printers. At least, it corresponds to Canon printers.
2. Contemporary printers get clogged less than it used to be. My dye-ink Canon Pro-100 didn't get clogged even after more than year of inactivity (the printer was switched off)! And it happened twice! Some users of pigment-ink Canon printers claim that their printers don't get clogged after a few months of inactivity.
3. Even in a BW mode printers use not only monochrome inks but color inks as well. I'm sure that when printing color images printers will use almost all colors. Surely, some colors may be used in a small amount but it still can be enough to avoid clogging.

Now I have a pigment-ink Canon Pro-1000 printer. It is said that if I don't print anything in 24 hours, it will initiate a self-cleaning process that wastes a few ml of inks. So I have to print something every day. At the same time I don't see any point in messing around with everyday unclog printing when I could print my photos instead. Automatically, ofcourse.

That's probably going to cause more problems than it solves.  It prints a purge sheet because that is effective at keeping nozzles exercised so for the purpose of exercising the nozzles, there is no substitute for the unclog pattern.  Printing a batch of "random" photos over time (say one a day) could lead to problems because it won't exercise the nozzles the way it should, some colors may not be accounted for (or not enough) and using it that way could give you a false sense of security thinking you are doing proper exercising of the nozzles when you are not.

Regards,
Mike

I see. Then maybe it's not a bad idea to create a new option in the Unclog menu so that Qimage will print not a color pattern but a pile of photos one at a time. This way it'll be more useful.

The unclog tool will never work for a head that is completely missing a color.  If multiple deep cleanings don't work, there are other options like soaking the head in Windex and other manual cleaning methods.  Best to ask a printer hardware group like the one below since this site is mostly about software:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1915547415436501

Regards,
Mike

Mike-I have a P800 which I haven't used in many months. I have problem which is nothing is printing for the yellow cartridge. Not  a single dot. I have tried your unclog program didn't help. Tried the builtin program heavy cleaning 3 times with a new cartridge but still no yellow dots. Anything else I can try or does it have to go back to Epson. I'm getting too old to wait for Epson to fix it. I assume its somewhere in the tube that goes from the cartridge to the printhead.

Jeff Jessee

I'm not sure it's really a creative frame, it just simulates a 2mm thick card board passepartout. Usually people give me an image and specify the length of one side of the printed image without the frame. Then, to avoid the hassle of precisely cutting a card board around, I was asked whether I could simulate the passepartout by printing this frame outside the image.

Anyway something seems not to work anymore, I haven't figured out what. I created a frame in Affinity Publisher and exported as tif. It worked fine. Then, based on this one, I adapted it to various frame  sizes (square, 1/2) but those don't work anymore. They show up in the cutout list but they are not applied and when clicking Done and saving, the thumbnail disappears in the main window.

Like everything in Qimage, it's a sticky setting so once you set it, it will spool and cool until you turn it off.

Regards,
Mike

Photo mats don't have that problem because they are literally a single mat that sits behind prints.  What you are talking about is not a photo mat: it's a creative frame.  So to use those you have to work within their capabilities and do as you suggest: create then in common sizes.  Most people tend to want common print sizes so you really are matching the print size and not the image aspect ratio so you would only need to match a few common print sizes.

Mike

Will this option be applied to all printing jobs?
If I set up this "Spool and Cool" option, will I be able to print my other printing jobs in an ordinary (quicker) way? Or after setting up this option all jobs will be printed 1 page per day?

I've created a cutout frame template in tiff format (length/height = 3/2) and it works. But this solution has probably a drawback with the stretching of the frame. If the image isn't exactly proportional to the cutout template in the length/height ratio, the frame will be stretched dis-proportionally, i.e. the distances of the outside lines from the image are not the same on the top and bottom as on the left and right hand side. For example: the cutout with a 3/2 ratio applied on an image with a 2/1 ratio results in a distance of 2mm on the left/right, as defined in the cutout template, but is reduced to less than 1.5mm on the top and bottom. Depending on the amount of stretching this can be quite visible.

I could create a series of cutouts which fit the most common image ratios to avoid very visible distortions but since I print for many other people, images come often with freehand cropping. So I cannot accommodate all ratios. Wouldn't a photo mat solution not have this problem? It stretches the mat out of the image according to the settings in the dialog box, right?