iPhoto ’08 user David Bahssin longs for a feature found in iPhoto ’06. He writes:
In my earlier versions of iPhoto ’06 I used to have wonderful printing templates called N-up and Sampler. Both these templates were very useful and made the most of my space on my paper. Now with iPhoto ’08 using their standard print size or contact sheet I cannot get six photos on the page nicely without wasting a lot of paper space thus making my images smaller. What’s more iphoto seems to crop the boarders of my images now when it used to print to the edge. Any suggestions?
Like you, I mourn the loss of these helpful presets and, as you suggest, the Contact Sheet template isn’t the same thing. Fortunately, you can get darned close the the results of those presets but it takes a little digging.
Specifically, select your images, click the Print button at the bottom of the iPhoto window, and take a stern look at the Print Size pop-up menu. I found that I was able to place six images in landscape orientation on a single piece of paper by choosing Custom from that pop-up menu and entering dimensions of 4 x 3 inches. The images filled the entire sheet of letter-sized paper without leaving a lot of white space, though I did lose the left and right edges of the image.
If you’re unwilling to sacrifice any portion of your images, you’re welcome to tweak the settings of the image size so that the resulting images more closely track with the original dimensions.