UPDATE: See my new video from March 2021!
Let’s say you’ve got a ginormous image that you’d like to print. Maybe it’s a picture of a map, and the resolution of the image is something like 2000 by 2200 pixels.
Obviously, you could just print the image to a single sheet of A4/Letter paper, but you’d lose a lot of detail.
If you’re a serious Photoshopper, you’d probably just fire up that particular app and use the built-in functionality to split and print.
For the rest of us, however, that’s not exactly what we’d call “easy”.
The good news is that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 all give you a wonderful (AHEM!) application that does exactly what you need…
You’re going to find this hard to believe, but that built-in Windows app that will split-print an image for you is none other than Microsoft’s much-maligned Paint application!!
I know – whodduh thunkit?
Although I have to say that Paint in Windows 7 is definitely better than the previous version, at least in terms of looks…
In any case, here’s what you do:
- Open the image you’d like to print in Paint
- Select: Print -> Page Setup (Vista and 7), or File -> Page Setup (in XP)
- Under Scaling, select Fit to and change the setting to something like “2 by 2 page(s)”
- Click OK
- Print the image from Paint, and make sure to select “All Pages”
That’s it – you’re done. You can take any image and have Paint print it out on multiple sheets of paper. If you’d like, you can also adjust the page margins in the Page Setup. In any case, all that’s left is to trim the white border from the individual printed pages, break out the scotch tape, and go to town.
Before you know it, you’ll have your huge image printed and assembled on regular-sized paper.
What’s really strange about this little feature is that I know a lot of people who would love to know about it. But 10 out of 10 people I asked had no idea that Paint could do this. Most people I talk to also have no idea that even in Windows XP, you can select a bunch of images, right click, and choose Send to -> Mail Recipient. That will present a little box that lets you automatically resize the images to a smaller resolution before opening your default e-mail client and attaching the resized images to a new message. And yet every Mac user knows their system can do that…
But then, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. When has Microsoft ever successfully advertised the truly useful features in their operating systems?
Helpful, thanks!
I thought I had done this before but had overlooked the pathway to make it happen in W8.
Thank you VERY much! This is so helpful!
I’m still having trouble with this and its making me crazy. I have an image resizer app on my phone it works great when I want to fit a particular photo for a certain frame. I can select the size I want or a custom size , lets say a 6×6 but this only works for dimensions that fit on a letter size paper. Is there a way to enlarge a photo with the exact dimesions I want and have that print on multiple pages? I’m not looking for sizes over 16×20. That’s what I’m actually trying to do. Lets say I want an 11X17, how can I do this in paint or in another program, so it actually prints and 11X17? I might just have them ordered, which is a shame because it will be costly. Any suggestions?
In windows 7 Paint Printing 3 pages wide by 5 pages tall… which box is width and height?
Bruhhhhh wide = width tall = height
This was extremely helpful! Thank you so much, it helped me get an assignment printed correctly.
Wow amazing work. Could not get this to work with adobe acrobat, who would have thought that MS paint would solve the problem
You can also insert the picture in a blank Excel file – in Excel you can set everything including the page breaks if needed before printing.
Great site. Lots of helpful information here.
I am sending it to several friends ans additionally sharing in delicious.
And naturally, thank you on your effort!
Thank You.
can you select a certain page to print only that page?
Hmm… You used to be able to, but now it seems if you select printing on multiple pages, the only option is to print all of them. 🙁
All you need is an intelligent application called longshotprt. This app can automaticly cut image into multiple pages and print them nicely .
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