this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Recommendations for a good photo printing application? (self.linux)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by cyborganism to c/[email protected]
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Hello [email protected]!

I've completely switched from dual boot to full Linux last year and I've been struggling to find the one tool that could replace the printer software that came with my Canon printer.

My printer came with an application that allows me to print border-less photos and apply fixes such as colour correction, remove red eyes, etc. So far I haven't found any application that allows me to print photos properly.

I'm using Kubuntu 24.04 and I tried using Gwenview to print my photos. While the dialog allows me to configure my printer to print on 4x6 border-less photo paper, it still prints with ~4mm borders.

I'm also asking myself, is this more of a KDE Plasma printing issue or an application printing issue?

Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: I'm even considering using paid software at this point. Any solution is welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Disclaimer: I've pretty much stopped printing photos at home and just take them to Walmart/Walgreens/etc so I'm a bit out of my depth here.

I'm also asking myself, is this more of a KDE Plasma printing issue or an application printing issue?

Possibly a driver issue. Are you using a CUPS driver or does Canon provide a Linux driver for the printer? In order to get the duplexer to work on my laser printer, I had to install Brother's official Linux driver. Maybe 'borderless' is a feature specific to the official driver?

You might try installing the Canon software in WINE and seeing:

  1. If you can print from that (not sure if it can or not)
  2. If you can't print directly from that, can the result be exported/saved to a format you can print from Linux? If so, does that addres the border issue?

Beyond that, I'm at a bit of a loss as I haven't done home photo printing in ages. When I did, I just dealt with the borders with a paper cutter.

[–] cyborganism 3 points 1 week ago

Thanks for the advice.

I did buy this printer for the purpose of printing photos. I send them out to friends with a letter every year lol. So going to a shop to get them printed kind of defeats the purpose.

I did try to use it through Wine with Bottles, but it's looking specifically for a Windows printer (or the spool system or whatever). So that's a no go.

Right now I'm just using a Windows VM instead.

I forgot how I installed the printer, so I need to check again if I'm using a Canon provided driver or the CUPS one.

Thanks for the advice!

[–] cyborganism 2 points 1 week ago

Hi I just wanted to come back to you about whether I was using CUPS or proprietary drivers. I am using proprietary Canon drivers provided from their support website. So I guess the official one in Linux doesn't support it somehow?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The Gutenprint plugin has support for a bunch of Canon printers. I haven't used it in a while but I remember it supporting borderless prints with CUPS drivers. Maybe not for all printers? Worth a look at least.

[–] cyborganism 2 points 1 week ago

Thanks! I'll take a look!

[–] cyborganism 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Hi, I just wanted to get back to you about Gutenprint.

This looks old. Is it still maintained?

EDIT: I installed it and tried setting up my printer but it says it cannot use that driver. So that's a no go I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Latest release seems to have been in March 2025. The version you get would depend on how you installed it. For Ubuntu/Kubuntu it looks like maybe they point to the Snap store? I have no idea how well that works and personally would avoid it.

Did you do that, or, download a deb or install "printer-driver-gutenprint" via apt?

In another comment you said you have the Canon proprietary driver. I think you would need the CUPS driver for this to work.

I didn't do this recently enough to remember what the process looked like. But in your situation I would probably try to uninstall everything print related, reboot, and then start with sudo apt update -y && sudo apt install printer-driver-gutenprint and see where that gets me.

[–] cyborganism 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah it was the snap one. I'll install a second printer using the cups driver and try again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The application you print with should not affect the borderless printing unless the application itself adds a margin around the image. Gwenview has a print preview which shows how it thinks it will look.

Stupid questions first: After selecting a borderless print profile, did you set the margins all the way to 0?

Can you check if the print is cut off by ~3mm or if is just rescaled?

[–] cyborganism 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I tried this, here's an example of what I got.

Setting up borderless paper in the print preview:

The result after:

And then when I print, I can't get landscape photos to print properly. Not only do I get the 4mm white border, but I get half of a landscape photo in portrait mode.... like wtf.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Weird.

You can set the paper profile twice, once by hitting Page setup in the Print preview and once after hitting print. Do you get different results when setting the profile to 4x6 and borderless twice? There's also scaling options in the Advanced tab in the printing dialog.

If that doesn't help you could ask the experts at https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues .

Make sure to read their reporting guidelines here: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/blob/master/REPORTING_ISSUES.md

[–] cyborganism 1 points 1 week ago

The advance tab only lets me choose the kind of paper (Glossy photo paper in my case) and to enable/disable grayscale printing.

The Job options has the following:

Then the page tab:

As you can see, even when I select borderless, margins are still there. And I can't set them all to 0. If I try, I still get two margins that I can't set to 0.

As someone else mentioned, this could be a driver problem. I'm gonna try installing the CUPS driver instead of the manufacturer provided one.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

There's lots, but you probably want to have a look at Darktable

Edit: Also just learned that Canon does provide Linux drivers for some models.

[–] cyborganism 1 points 1 week ago

Yes, I tried Darktable but I still can't get the image to get cropped to print border-less. My smartphone camera either prints 3:4, 9:16, 1:1, or whatever the screen ratio is. But it doesn't match the traditional 4x6 paper photo ratio. So the photo needs to be slightly cropped to fit the whole sheet.

And then when it's time for printing, it still prints white borders anyway. Even if I select 4x6 borderless.