Photo Printing for Dummies is a program designed to make it easy for newcomers to print out their photographs at different sizes and arranged in different ways on an A4 page. The brainwave of the publisher that invented the excellent and highly successful For Dummies series of books, it's extremely easy to use (the electronic manual is a bare 10 pages long) and does exactly what it says on the box. From the main screen you can choose from 16 different printing layouts, all usefully designed around A4 and ranging from labels and passport photos to much larger pictures where you'll only get two to a page. Having chosen your layout you use the left-hand pane to navigate to the folder where your photos are stored and then double click to open it. You can simply list the names of the photos and preview them individually as you click on each one, or see all of them as tiny thumbnails. To add a photo to your layout simply click it and then click on one of the empty spaces on the page. To remove a photo, click on it again with the right mouse button.
You can rearrange photos by picking them up and dragging them to another position on the page, and even change the whole layout by clicking the Format button; if you do that, remember that if you go from a layout with 10 photos on it to a layout with four, only the first four photos will be displayed. Once you're happy with the layout, click the Print button and follow the instructions to print out your page.
There's a bit of a shock at the beginning when, after reading the opening screen and clicking Run the program appears to crash--it doesn't, it just dumps the For Dummies intro out of the memory and goes off and loads the program proper. After that, there are no nasty surprises, just a decent selection of photo layouts. To be fair the software that you get with modern inkjet printers (especially those from Hewlett Packard and Epson) is also pretty good at this kind of thing. But if your printer's a bit old-fashioned and you're still struggling, this will solve your photo printing problems. --Rob Beattie
