When my father-in-law gives me these CD's he bought while traveling and said he wanted to see the photos that were on them. I thought it would be no problem and happily agreed. To my dismay there turned out to be nearly 2000 photos in various folders and I was at a loss.

I remembered that with Windows XP there was a way to select a photo and then use the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP but I could not get it to work on the folders I had chosen. Everytime I clicked on a folder the list of wizard tasks on the left never offered the print tasks.

So, finally, I discover that a folder can be identified as a "Picture" folder by right clicking on the folder, choosing customize and then selecting "Pictures" or "Photo Album".


However the trick is to do this to the folder above the folder where the photos are. This means that if the photos are in /home/photosnew/printme you need to make the "photosnew" a "Picture" folder. Then you can select one or more other folders inside of it and see the print picture wizard.


Once that was done I selected all of the folders and used the printing wizard to make a contact sheet for all 2000 photos. It came to about 63 pages (35 photos per page) but it looked good and all of the photos had their file names on them.

Note, the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP did not search deep into my folders. For example, some photos were in /home/photosnew/printme/originals and I was in the photosnew directory when I selected the other folders (2 levels higher). I had to move the photos from /originals to /printme and then everything went fine.

Tags: XP, Photo, Sheet