I am currently putting together a book with documents, memorabilia, and photos from my two years in Paraguay, and I need your advice and help if possible.

Part of this project involves an "at a glance" view of my hundreds of photos (perfectly labeled and edited per OCD fashion!). Obviously I'm not going to print 1, 4, 6 or even 9 photos per page, as I wouldn't have quite enough room (or ink). What I need is the ability to print a quality contact sheet of 35+ photos (with a portion of the file name below each photo), that way I can have thumbnails of all my photos on approximately 7-8 pages (back and front). I have a brand-new Lexmark 4975 Pro 3-in-1 inkjet printer (their latest model), photo cartridge and other XL cartridges, and 2-sided glossy brochure paper.

Lexmark software automatically overrides the standard Windows photo printing wizard and does not allow the printing of more than 9 photos per page directly to the printer. So, I have tried using PrimoPDF to "print" a PDF contact sheet of 35 photos + labels (in theory, this is my solution) with the same wizard, but after printing the PDF sheet, it really doesn't look that great. The photos, even at higher res downsizes, have a lot of 'jaggies' and are not very clear (also I turned off my printer's automatic photo sharpening because that seemed to make things worse). I assume this is PrimoPDF's fault in some way due to additional compression or something.

Thus, I am currently at a loss as to what would be a satisfactory solution to my problem. I suppose I could live with the results I can get, but it seems like this should be simple these days. How hard should it be to downsize quality 5-7 megapixel photos to small, good looking thumbnails on a contact sheet? I realize that I could use Photoshop or GIMP to manually make contact sheets, but this would be extremely time consuming. It is extra frustrating because any trial and error I do means I have less and less photo ink to work with.

Any help or wisdom is much appreciated!

PrimoPDF may be defaulting to 75dpi "screen" quality. Try finding an option in it to create the PDF at higher DPI.

Thanks for the tip Sanchek.

Suspicious of PrimoPDF, I installed CutePDF to see if there would be any difference. The print-out with CutePDF is much better. There is no apparent way to change the DPI setting for PrimoPDF, so it must have been built-in at lower quality.

Additionally, checking the "Print as Image" box within Adobe Reader's print dialog seemed to smooth things out even more.