Do you have a printing system?

DaniAlencar (JB Studio)

DaniAlencar (JB Studio)

Designer: JB Studio
I was a traditional scrapper and then I migrated to digital but I had only a few layouts (really few... I guess 2 or 3) printed. I just couldn't find my printing system right. How do you do that? Do you print at home or you use a online service? How often do you print? How do you organize yours files?
 
I find that I don't often print the ones I make for myself. I have them on my laptop. The ones I've made for others (And the few of my own I did print) I sent off to Artscow.com. It's slow to ship because it comes out of Hong Kong, but you can't beat their prices and the quality is really good too. The cool thing is they also have lots of neat gifts (My son has a backpack with our family photo on it that I carried as his diaper bag and now he uses to carry things around when we're out and about. It's 5 years old and still looks brand new!)
Plus artscow is always giving freebies away, you just pay shipping. Might be worth looking into!
I know my sister uses Snapfish or Shutterfly because she doesn't like the long waiting time to get her prints, but to me, they are pricey!
 
Oh, thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it for sure. Besides the printing service, I need to come up with a system to keep track of what I have to print and what is already printed. I don't know where to start.
 
Well....I print [eventually]. If a quick one pager I want done, I take it to Sam's Club [I merge the 12x12 onto a 12x16 paper size they have so it is not distorted. Often I will fill that 4 inch empty area with smaller photos].
I also use Persnickety Prints, Scrapping Simply and VioVio.
It just depends if I have them printed as individual LO to slide into an album or bound in a book.
Example- DD's wedding album, our cruises and my project 52= a book
Our frequent day trips, beach vacations individual 12x12 and slide into an album.
m
ps- at present, I'm behind on printing.
 
I print into bound albums. I used to print the 12x12 pages individually, put them in page protectors, and put them in an album. I found that the bound albums were actually cheaper and took up less space!

I do our 365 albums. Then the kids have their yearly albums. I plan on doing one album each with all their school photos and school events, so those photos probably won't be in their yearly albums.

It's so much fun getting the bound albums in the mail! :)
 
I print through Shutterfly in their 12x12 books. I like the less bulky pages and the coupons are pretty good. I can usually print for about a $1 a page. Thats a steal of a deal. I do keep CD's and a back up of all the pages so the kids can have a digital copy someday.
 
DaniAlencar (JB Studio) said:
Oh, thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it for sure. Besides the printing service, I need to come up with a system to keep track of what I have to print and what is already printed. I don't know where to start.
Click to expand...

I have folders on my desktop. One is printed, pages ready to print (broken down into subfolders by the year) then when I am ready to print, I can upload it to Shutterfly chronologically. My "printed" folder gets backed up again to the external drive and to CD's.
 
Colleen said:
I print into bound albums. I used to print the 12x12 pages individually, put them in page protectors, and put them in an album. I found that the bound albums were actually cheaper and took up less space!

I do our 365 albums. Then the kids have their yearly albums. I plan on doing one album each with all their school photos and school events, so those photos probably won't be in their yearly albums.

It's so much fun getting the bound albums in the mail! :)
Click to expand...

Oh, I love the idea of bound albums, but I should have all layouts ready to go to print them right? Which service do you use?
 
jencrook said:
I have folders on my desktop. One is printed, pages ready to print (broken down into subfolders by the year) then when I am ready to print, I can upload it to Shutterfly chronologically. My "printed" folder gets backed up again to the external drive and to CD's.
Click to expand...

mmm it's a good system, so I guess you move from one folder to another when they are printed, right? I like the idea. Do you also keep editable files or only the flat images in high resolution?
 
I've only used Blurb so far. I just ordered a wedding album for my brother and SIL from persnickety prints though. Yes, they all need to be ready to print for that album. You also want to make sure that it's all in the correct order too once you add it to the book online. ;)
DaniAlencar (JB Studio) said:
Oh, I love the idea of bound albums, but I should have all layouts ready to go to print them right? Which service do you use?
Click to expand...
 
To date I've kept all my TIFFs/PSDs and the JPG. I was just wondering the other day if I needed to keep all my TIFFs/PSDs. I haven't been brave enough to delete them yet though. ;)
DaniAlencar (JB Studio) said:
mmm it's a good system, so I guess you move from one folder to another when they are printed, right? I like the idea. Do you also keep editable files or only the flat images in high resolution?
Click to expand...
 
I use Persnickety Prints when they have their sales twice a year.
Once I've finished a page, I have 5 files on my desktop: One for each of my kids and my husband&I (these are pages where I have personalized the journaling for each person) and then a file for Persnickety (this is for general pages that I don't need to personalize journaling on).
Then I move the original TIFF to the actual photo file (I organize by year, month, date(or event) - for example >2014 >>2014-01 >>2014-01-18 Tam's Birthday).
 
*cough*
Gingerscraps has an exclusive partnership with Persnickety Prints* to help make printing easier
*cough*

I LOVE them, personally. I've used a few others, but they're the only ones who are consistently wonderful. They don't just print and ship. They inspect each and every print, and if it's not perfect, they'll reprint until it is, at no cost to you.
 
Sarah said:
*cough*
Gingerscraps has an exclusive partnership with Persnickety Prints* to help make printing easier
*cough*

I LOVE them, personally. I've used a few others, but they're the only ones who are consistently wonderful. They don't just print and ship. They inspect each and every print, and if it's not perfect, they'll reprint until it is, at no cost to you.
Click to expand...

What was this partnership about? I want to print with them.
 
craftytam said:
I use Persnickety Prints when they have their sales twice a year.
Once I've finished a page, I have 5 files on my desktop: One for each of my kids and my husband&I (these are pages where I have personalized the journaling for each person) and then a file for Persnickety (this is for general pages that I don't need to personalize journaling on).
Then I move the original TIFF to the actual photo file (I organize by year, month, date(or event) - for example >2014 >>2014-01 >>2014-01-18 Tam's Birthday).
Click to expand...

So you keep your editable files in the photos folder? interesting...
 
I also keep all of my editable files, but I no longer save them as PSDs. I'm also resaving all PSDs as TIFs. When I have enough layouts done to fill a disk, I back them up on a DVD, either by person, event, or year. Each layout folder contains the final TIF file, the web thumbnail file I published online, a notepad file with the credits, and any supporting files I created to build the layout. Sometimes, I accumulate enough layouts about a particular person to burn them all together on a single DVD.

NOTE: I tried those DVDs that you can use as editable disks, like a jump drive, but I didn't like them. In fact, I messed up once while saving a bunch of kit files and lost about half of the zipfiles I had collected for an advent blog hop. Bummer ...

In re: printing, a long time ago, I bought a HP Deskjet 9800 printer that can do 12x12 sheets and posters. However, I only printed a few LOs with it, mostly because the ink cartridges were so expensive. Unfortunately, I did some publicity work for a candidate during the election campaigns one year. Using one color only (green) messed up the settings on the machine. I haven't had the time or money to get it fixed, so that printer just sits.

My small printer got messed up during tax season this year when it jammed and I pulled the torn pieces out in a hurry. Now it displays a permanent paper jam message even though it has been cleaned thoroughly and no longer has a paper jam. This is a known problem with older HP Officejet 4500 printers.

I don't know if this problem has been fixed in the new HP Officejet 4500 model. What I do know is that the ink cartridges for the older 4500 printer are different from the ones used for the current 4500 printer, which leaves me with a bunch of ink cartridges I can't use. I have truly come to dislike HP printers completely and totally!

As far as printing services are concerned, I haven't used any of them, mostly because I haven't got enough of any one topic to complete an entire bound album. This is a big goal of mine, though. I'm very happy to hear that ArtsCow is good, reliable, and inexpensive. Delivery time is not an issue for me. I also would like to try Persnickety Prints as I hear they provide super excellent service.

Thanks so much for bringing up this topic, Dani!
 
I created a folder named "Gallery" for thumbnails and notepad files and another one to save TIFF files and another one named "TO PRINT" where I save the high resolution layouts. I will wait until I have at least 20 to upload to Persnickety, I'll try them first.
 
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