Print

[tjm]

We are looking at using Coopermine for our school district.  It looks like an excellent way to organize and maintain student pics.  However, the students need to be able to print the pictures which I am told at the minimum requires 300 dpi.  It looks like everything is 72 dpi.  Is there a way to change this?

Please help....completely clueless in this area!!

Thanks!
TJ

[Joachim Müller]

Original pics users upload won't be changed: if you upload a picture that has a resolution of 300dpi, it will stay that way (unless you set an option in coppermine's config to resize original files as well). Only the resized pics (intermediate and thumb) may not have 300dpi when using GD as image library (not sure about this though, I never tested it). The reason is obvious: larger resolutions cost storage space. A computer screen can only display 96dpi. Only a printer can display/print better resolutions. However, I've never heard complaints about this, so I suggest posting a link to one of the pics that was resized to a "bad" resolution.

[jenkinl1302]

How large do you need the printed pictures to be?  If your original photos are large enough, even at 72 dpi, they should print fine.  Nearly every digital camera I've seen (mostly point-and-click models) all take their pictures at 72 dpi, but the image dimensions are rediculously large (1600x1200 or thereabouts, depending on the megapixels of the camera).  If the printer NEEDS a 300 dpi photo, that is easily accomplished through Photoshop or other photo editing software.  The 1600x1200 px image should easily produce a quality photo at 3x5 or 4x6.

As GauGau said, what you keep in resolution, you sacrifice in file size, though moderately-sized jpegs shouldn't take more than a mb or so.