Do you know if there is a way to delete large volume of photos off a Canon Imagerunner 110 (Heidelberg 110) versus having to use the Planet Press/Tools/Printer Utilities and having to type thousands of photo names and send "Delete from printer"?

We have copied and pasted a list of photos or forms into Printer Utilities small delete window and have found that it may only delete about 10 or so files like there is a limit on the number of names you can enter into the delete list window. It will hold a long list but it only deletes about 20 or so on the printer. This makes us have to send the list in short groups and run it multiple times to get the files to delete.

Also with all your background in dealing with these kind of printers would you happen to know how to go to the printer itself and find these files and remove them?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

cpamc,

Short of flushing/reformating the printer's hard disk, there isn't another way to delete all the files at once on the printer from PlanetPress. Unfortunately, the "Delete from printer" utility does not support wildcards, and so you can't tell it to delete * files... So you have to enter them manually.

As for how to format/flush the hard disk, this would be done on the printer itself, though how you do it depends on the printer model, it's different on every printers. Consulting the printer's manual or calling the manufacturer is probably the thing to do here.

Regards,
Raphaël Lalonde Lefebvre

Actually there is a way to do this using PostScript, however I don't personally know it. I have asked one of my colleagues who is more knowledgeable than me in that language to help me out, so stay tuned for that method later today.

Ah, it turns out that perhaps flushing the hard disk may be the better way. The script I mentionned wasn't really that at all unfortunately, it was simple a series of "Delete" commands in PostScript that were uploaded to the printer.

In order to use something like this, you would need to actually know, beforehand, what files you want to delete. For example, when uploading new photos, you keep a list on the side (in a database for example) where their time to live and size are kept. You would then build your PostScript deletion file through a query in that database.

The format for the deletion is this:


You then have to send this file to the printer, for example through an LPR Queue, in Passthrough mode (no document).

Please note: This information is provided as-is with no responsibility or warranty on our part. We cannot be held liable if deleting files on your printer causes the printer to stop functioning. We strongly advise contacting your printer manufacturer for further tips and perhaps alternate, safer, methods.

This is exactly what we're looking for. We don't want to delete the whole hard drive just clear off about 2000 unneeded photos.
We have a list of the photos already so this is much better. Thanks!

I have tried this but the printer says:

"Error: undefined; Offending Command:"

And it was doing it on the file name so I changed it to include the file path.

%!PS-Adobe-2.0
/var/ps/24702.JPG deletefile\n
/var/ps/24704.JPG deletefile\n

but now its giving the Offending Command on the "deletefile\n"
I tried other variations but no success. So it was able to find the image, but it doesn't understand the delete command. Do you know of any other postscript command to delete the file? Or does it take a Unix command to delete the file since the printer server is running an Unix system?

Thank you for getting me going in the right direction.

Hmn, try to remove the \n in the end. That's a line return that was necessary in the method I used to create the file (a variable that was incremented), but it's not meant to be in the actual output file.

Yes, I tried that already, I've also tried

rm -f /var/ps/24702.JPG

or

remove file:/var/ps/24702.JPG.

I even tried %KDKSource: remove file:/var/ps/24702.JPG

and got a different error that said Non-existent source file OR job emulation is incorrect.


I'll keep looking, thanks for your help.

#1 don't put the images in the root folder. There's been an option since 6.2ish to do it from the Image Downloader. There are files in that folder the printer needs to run, put the images in a sub folder, ps/jobname/. Had someone try and FTP into the folder and delete the manually and accidentally grabbed a system file along with the images. Luckily one of the other systems had the file and we restored it from there without reloading the entire printer. We now keep a backup of the ps folder on the network just in case.

If this is a reoccurring job and you have them in a sub folder, you can setup an FTPin Watch process to pull them from the HD and delete all the files in that job folder.