A photo printing wizard miscellany

Despite being surprisingly inflexible about it's print sizes, I do like that photo printing wizard. As long as you play by its rules, it's very good.

Just remember to check out the "Options" link at the bottom right of the wizard. You get a dialog like this:

I've turned off the "Sharpen for printing" option, and it's made a huge difference to my photos; they look much more natural now. I haven't been overly pleased with how they've have been printing - everything's been a little too crisp, with very hard edges. I'm very glad to have sorted this out. I'd also recommend having a wander through your printer's colour settings - my Epson was thoughtfully "enhancing" my photos. Not any more.

Anyway, if you feel the urge to add this wizard to your application, you can find it in the Windows Image Acquisition SDK. Simply create WIA.CommonDialog and call ShowPhotoPrintingWizard passing in a list of filenames. It's even been around since XP (Service Pack 1).

And it's nice to know that I'm not alone in wanting to be able to print at arbitrary sizes. But according to an online chat held by Microsoft TechNet, I might be out of luck:

Q: Will the photo printing wizard allow custom sized photos?
A: There are no current plans to support this.

Q: Will the photo printing wizard allow for custom layouts?
A: We are looking at making the templates extensible in the next version.

This was from way back in June 2002. Maybe in Windows 7.