Printing Pictures in Windows XP

Unlike earlier versions of windows, XP has simplified the process of printing colour photos. Whether you took the picture yourself or received it via email, printing pictures has never been so easy.

Find the Pictures you want to print

When you save a picture from an email, or from your digital camera, XP should automatically save them into your My Pictures folder. To find the pictures you want to print, click on the start button, and then click on the My Pictures menu item, which is usually near the top on the right hand side of the menu.

Once the my pictures folder has opened, you should see a box labelled Picture Tasks on the left hand side, and in the box, a link called Print Pictures. Click on the Print Pictures link to start to photo printing wizard that will help you print the photos you want.

Using the Photo Printing Wizard to Select your Photos

Once the wizard appears, click on the next button, to move to the photo selection stage. You should now see your thumbnails of your pictures. If you have a lot of pictures, then use the scrollbar on the right hand side to scroll through them all.

In the top right hand corner of each thumbnail there should be a small box with a tick in it. This means that the wizard has selected that picture for printing. Usually the wizard starts off selecting every available picture for printing. If you only want to pick a few pictures for printing, then you can either click on the tickboxes to toggle the tick for each picture you don't want, leaving just the pictures you do want to print with a tick in the corner, or easier, click on the clear all button to remove the tick from all of the pictures. Now select the individual pictures you want to print by clicking on the empty tick box in the top corner of the picture.

Please note, that the tick won't appear on the picture when you print it out.

Selecting a layout

Once you have picked all of the pictures you want to print, click on the next button a the bottom of the wizard. Most people only have one printer installed so you should just see your usual printer listed on this next page. If not, select the printer you want to use from the list provided, then click next.

On this preview page, you can select a layout you want from the left hand list, and XP will preview how it will look when you print it, in the right hand preview. Scroll down the available layouts to pick one you want.

If you want to change the pictures you have selected you can always click on the back button to return to the picture selection page.

Once you have the layout you want, just click the next button and windows XP will start printing your pictures.

Handy Tips

If you want to print quite a few pictures, it is often easier to just print one pages worth at a time. To do this you need to know which layout you are going to choose, so you know how many prints will fit on a page. Then in the image selection section of the wizard, just pick the pictures you want on the first page, and go through the steps to print them, then repeat for the remaining pictures. This way you can see exactly how the pictures will come out on the preview screen.

Windows Guide