Disclaimer

Instant Photo Booth is a Windows Store app which runs in a restricted environment. Store apps are not allowed to have a dependency on any other app or desktop application. The PrintHelper is a desktop application. While IPB does not actually depend on PrintHelper to function, the relationship between the two falls into a gray area. Because of this, PrintHelper is not an official product. We do not sell it, nor do we officially promote it, even though PrintHelper solves a serious deficiency in the Windows Store app printing workflow.

PrintHelper is rough around the edges. By using PrintHelper you acknowledge that it is free software that is not officially supported.

The Problem

While the Windows Store app environment is a fantastic touch-centric kiosk platform, it fails to provide the necessary automation for a truly stand-alone application. The most glaring problem is that there is no way to programmatically initiate a print job. The most a programmer can do is open the Windows printing UI for the user. Then the user must pick the printer, pick the print options, and finally initiate the job. For a photo booth kiosk this places far too heavy a burden on the user.

The Solution

We have developed a little utility called PrintHelper that runs on the Windows Desktop. NOTE: It will not work on a Windows RT device such as the Surface RT. The utility watches the IPB Final Images folder and sends new images to the default printer automatically. The utility keeps track of which images have already been printed. There is also provision for selecting and reprinting images.

Get Started

Click here to download the PrintHelper ZIP archive

We recommend creating a folder for the utility and placing it there. For example, "C:\PrintHelper\" You can extract the archive to this folder.

The utility is very basic. There are very few options and no way to change the printer or its options. Make sure that your desired printer is the default printer and that the page size, paper tray, etc. that you want are set as the defaults for the printer. You can do this through the printer properties in the Windows Control Panel.

How To Use It

• 1. Make sure that there are NO images in the Pictures\Instant Photo Booth\Final Images folder (unless you want to print them all at once)
• 2. Launch PrintHelper
• 3. Adjust margin and scale values if needed
• 4. Click "Start printing" – PrintHelper will now be watching the IPB Final Images folder for new images and will send them automatically to the default printer.

Within Instant Photo Booth, go to the Workflow settings panel and turn off "Allow standard Windows printing from within Instant Photo Booth." This will cause the user to be alerted that their print job has been queued, while PrintHelper does its work behind the scenes.

There are upper left corner offsets and overall page scale values along the bottom edge of the PrintHelper program window. By default they are 6, 6 and 100% for width and height. These seem to work with most printers. For the Canon Selphy CP910, which overscales images, we recommend 10, 20, 93, and 92. If you find that your images are being cropped or shifted, you can experiment with these values. NOTE: Only use whole numbers for corner and scale values. Fractional values will cause PrintHelper to malfunction.

To reprint and image, select its thumbnail and click "Reprint selected."