Remote Printing
A few weeks ago I was out with my wife and she got the funniest picture of my son with her iPhone. I know it was only an iPhone picture so probably not worthy of printing, but she wanted it printed anyway. I have to say, the new iPhone 4s has an amazing little camera on it and under the right conditions, you can get a nice 4×6 or 8×10. Not SLR quality but still ok for regular home use. But back to my story….
So I started to think, wouldn’t it be cool if when she took these cool, cute, and funny photos, she could print them directly from her phone no matter where she was? I know there are services that we could sign up for and have them shipped to the house. What if we only wanted that one photo? Why pay $4 shipping for 1 photo? After a little research (4 hours one night) I found that Google Cloud Print will do what I wanted and would do it with pretty much any printer.
Then I got this bright idea! I could use this to print documents and contracts for clients and have them ready for when I got home to mail out. But wait! Now my wife won’t be able to print her cute photos of my son because our printer does not have a separate tray for photo paper. So what did I do? Found a cheap printer to use for her photos and added our office printer to Google Cloud Print.
I have always been an Epson fan for photo printing, so I started my search there. I was thinking I might want just a dedicated 4×6 printer, but decided I did not want t0 be limited to small prints only. Then I found a few 13×19 printers for cheap, but again did not want to get back in to larger format printing at home since it costs so much. I finally found something right in the middle and for a very cheap price. The Epson NX430 was only $50 and outputs a decent photo for home use. I would never give a print to a client but for something to print at home; it is not a bad printer at all.
Setup to Google Cloud Print services was easier than ever. I never even plugged the printer in to a computer! I just connected it to my wireless internet in the studio and then logged in to Google Cloud Print on my computer and added it as a printer. On Epson’s iPrint site, I added a custom email address that I can just email a photo to and the printer will print it at my pre-decided settings. To test it out, I went for a walk with my wife and son and sent a few photos back to the printer at home. When we got home, the prints were waiting for us in my studio. Pretty simple and straight forward.
After doing all of this fun remote printing, I got another idea for wireless tether shooting and remote printing at events/weddings. I will leave that for a later blog post. So check back to see where we go with it 
If you have any questions with getting your remote printing going from your iPhone or iPad, leave me a comment and I will help if I can.