Be cautious printing pictures of coins at Walgreens
CaptHenway
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Doing a show and tell at an upcoming coin club meeting, and Jeff Shevlin (So-Called Dollar Guy) was kind enough to shoot a few images I needed and email them to me. I downloaded them onto a thumb drive and ordered prints from Walgreen's website.
I selected 5x7 prints because I wanted some space at either end to handle the prints by. Went by the store to pick them up along with some prescriptions and discovered that their system had enlarged the round images to the full 7 inch width, with at best a single mm of border on either side, while chopping off the tops and bottoms of the circles. Useless.
Fortunately I had the thumb drive in my pocket, so I spoke with the nice lady at the photo department and she pointed out an option to basically print a 5-inch square in the middle of the 5x7 print, which was what I wanted, so I redid them and they did not charge me for the remakes. However, several of the prints have the flat part of the rim cut off at the top and/or the bottom.
They do have 4x4 and 8x8 square print options that I did not try. Might work, might still cut off the rims. Don't know why they can't just print the entire image and not enlarge it to death.
Comments
Yeah, this is a common problem for many kinds of pictures. What I end up doing in these scenarios is create a file with the dimensions I want to print at, set the resolution to the detail I need, place the image where I want and then get it printed. Basically it removes all the automated decision making by the printer.
TurtleCat Gold Dollars
Doesn't it show you cropping before you submit the order? I know some other sites do, but I can't remember if Walgreens does. The best thing to do, however, is to have the image you want printed match the aspect ratio of the print you want to make, which means doing some formatting ahead of time in Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net, Pixlr, Imagemagick, or whatever you use.
Keeper of the VAM Catalog • Professional Coin Imaging • Prime Number Set • World Coins in Early America • British Trade Dollars
As a photographer, I am no stranger to challenges like this. If you want some real entertainment, get a ruler to measure a “4x6” print that you might have in your home.
Looking for Top Pop Mercury Dime Varieties & High Grade Mercury Dime Toners.
A few years ago I went to a pharmacy to have an airplane photo printed which was going in something I was framing. It was a tight crop in the first place and when they printed it the tip of nose was cut off, so I couldn’t use it. I showed it to the person at the counter and she said they could reprint it. I didn’t have the file on me and they didn’t keep the files. “Oh, we can just scan the one you’re holding and reprint it!” 🤦🏻