Wow! That's complicated. Maybe it has something to do with my digital camera, but when I upload my photos to Ofoto and my girlfriend orders them from there at fairly conventional sizes, they look pretty good and the cost is pretty low.
How about CVS? I heard they have good kiosks, also.
I usually just use 8.5x11 photo paper in my inkjet and cut.
Well, they're probably cropping, but if you don't have anything near the edges you might not notice. I didn't want my mountain picture center-cropped though because it was off-center to begin with.
Arguably I'm too concerned about cropping, since the photo frames I got all cut off a bit more of the edge as well.
Ofotos not bad, and I've heard good things about Snapfish.
Max,
that was my plan B...my Uncle Bill didn't have the paper though.
2 questions...are photo printers smart enough to not waste ink printing "white" for a border?
Also, I guess you have to be very sure that your printer doesn't rescale, and/or your software is aware of the "printable area" of the printer. I got good results using Word, for instance.
As long as the color is true white (#FFFFFF), my HP DeskJet interprets that as "do not print anything." In a sense, it has to be that way, as there's no white ink.
Well, I assume it has some way of printing #FEFEFE light grey, or whatever...they don't make lighter colors just by letting the photostock show through "more", do they?
I did something similar for scanning in photos for my (then infant) son's website photo album. I set up a bunch of profiles with different DPIs and defined sizes, both horizontal & vertical. For each photo is was a simple matter of putting it on the scanner, doing a preview, selecting a profile which fit the desired portion of the image, and dragging the selection box around the preview. It was funny how many horizontal photos were better cropped vertically & vice versa.